Literary Arts
The English Department annually sponsors and co-sponsors significant contemporary writers and scholars, often winners of PEN/Faulkner Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, MacArthur "genius grants," National Book Awards and various other honors.
All writers brought to campus work with students personally. For more information, please email Mark J. Riley at mariley@davidson.edu or call 704-894-2289.
All events are free and open to the public.
2024-2025 Literary Events Calendar
Sponsors of these events include: the Abbott family, DACE, the McGee Professorship, the BACCA Foundation Visiting Scholar and Artist Program, and the academic departments of Africana Studies, English, and Humanities.
Location: Carolina Inn
Time: 7 p.m.
Caroline Harper New is the author of A History of Half-Birds (Milkweed, 2024) winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry. As a poet, artist, and anthropologist, her interdisciplinary work includes sculptures, paintings, short films, translations, and eco-collaborations. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is recipient of the 2023 Malahat Open Season Award, 2023 Driftwood In-House Poem Contest, 2022 John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry, 2022 Robert & Adele Schiff Award, and 2022 Meader Family Award amongst others. She earned a BA in Anthropology from Davidson College and an MFA from the University of Michigan.
Brooke Shaffner’s novel Country of Under won a Next Generation Indie Book Award Grand Prize for Fiction and the 1729 Book Prize. The novel was the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up. She has received grants from the Arts & Science Council, United States Artists, and the Saltonstall Foundation and residencies from MacDowell, Ucross, Saltonstall, the Edward Albee Foundation, Jentel, I-Park, and VCCA. Brooke founded Freedom Tunnel Press with her partner Niteesh Elias to publish artivist books that straddle borders; she teaches and edits through her company Between the Lines and is on the faculty of the North Carolina Writers' Network and Charlotte Lit. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. At Davidson, she won the Charles Lloyd Writing Award. Find more at brookeshaffner.com.
Location: Alvarez-Smith 900 Room, Knobloch Campus Center
Time: 8 p.m.
Shireen Campbell teaches a variety of literature and writing courses, with special interest in genre fictions, fanfiction, young adult fiction, and contemporary women writers. Recent publications range from creative nonfiction to research in second language acquisition and strategies for career preparation within English majors. Professor Campbell has lectured both locally and internationally on book censorship in schools, particularly in regard to school libraries, and blogged about substantial and increasing challenges to the student right to receive information that accompanies the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
Location: Lilly Family Gallery, Chambers Building
Time: 7 p.m.
Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins Press, 2019) and What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central, 2023), which was awarded the 2024 Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and her PhD in English with specializations in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. In 2019, she co-founded the Puerto Rican Literature Project, a digital archive documenting the lives and work of hundreds of Puerto Rican writers from over the last century. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.
Location: Alvarez-Smith 900 Room, Knobloch Campus Center
Time: 7 p.m.
Davidson’s own literary geniuses share some of their own uninhibited contributions to the written tradition.
Location: Alvarez-Smith 900 Room, Knobloch Campus Center
Time: 7 p.m.
Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, which received the 2020 Award in Poetry from The Believer magazine. Hemming the Water, her first book of poems, was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award. She received the Inaugural Lucille Clifton Legacy Award in Poetry from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and served as Poet In Residence for the 2018 Queensland Poetry Festival in Brisbane, Australia. Between the publication of her two poetry books, Harvey co-wrote Marvel’s World of Wakanda (with Ta-Nehisi Coates), earning an Eisner Award for best limited series, and co-wrote the comic book series Black Panther & the Crew. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts where she is the Tammis Day Professor of Poetry at Smith College.
Past Presenters
Jackie Shelton Green
Clint Smith
Margaret Atwood
Don Delillo
Claudia Rankine
Salman Rushdie