Fall 2024 Reading Series

Oct. 9 | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room

Douglas Stuart is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has been translated into more than 40 languages. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was also named British Book of the Year and Debut of the Year at the 2021 British Book Awards and was a finalist for more than 20 other literary awards. His latest novel, Young Mungo, was a Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller and a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His essays on gender, class, and conformity have appeared on Lit Hub, and his short stories are published in The New Yorker. He is currently working on adapting both of his novels for A24 Pictures. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Stuart has a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art. Since 2000, he has lived and worked in New York City.

Oct. 30 | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Maya C. Popa is the author of two collections, Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) named one of the Guardian’s recent best books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of the English department bursary for exceptional merit. She was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she received her MA, and a Veterans Fellow at NYU, where she earned her MFA. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s best-selling literature publications. Since 2018, she has served as the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School. She teaches advanced poetry at NYU and runs the online writing community Conscious Writers Collective.

Nov. 6 | 6:30 p.m. | Goodhart Hall | Music Room 

Lynnée Denise, a global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought, is an Amsterdam-based writer and interdisciplinary artist originally from Los Angeles, California. Influenced by her parents' record collection and the 1980s, Denise’s work explores the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture within the African Diaspora. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where her research examines how iterations of sound system culture create a living archive and refuge for the Black queer diaspora. Her debut book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (University of Texas Press), offers a narrative journey of reclamation that details and humanizes the life, musical contributions, and cultural impact of Willie Mae Thornton.

Airea D. Matthews’ debut poetry collection, Simulacra, won the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. She is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that addresses class and race, which received the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Matthews is an associate professor and co-chairs the creative writing department at Bryn Mawr College, where she has been honored with the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award.