Literary Arts

The English Department annually sponsors and co-sponsors significant contemporary writers and scholars, often winners of Pulitzer Prizes, MacArthur "genius grants," National Book Awards and various other honors.

All writers brought to campus work with students personally; all public presentations are free. For more information, please email Kathy Barton at kabarton@davidson.edu or call 704-894-2254.

Spring 2022 Literary Events

All events are free and open to the public. Attendees must comply with college COVID policies. All Literary Events will also be live-streamed for audiences. Event live streams will be shared via YouTube on event dates.

Jack Livings is author of a novel, The Blizzard Party, and a story collection, The Dog, which was awarded the PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Rome Prize for Literature and was named a Best Book of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement. His short fiction has appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories, among other places, and has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he lives in New York with his family.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of two previous novels, All Is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost and Inheritance. Her new novel, The Family Chao, will be published by W. W. Norton in February, 2022. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin. She is the director of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives with her husband and daughter in Iowa City, Iowa.

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers (New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice book, 2016 International Latino Book Award) and the story collection How to Leave Hialeah (Iowa Short Fiction Prize, John Gardner Book Award, Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award). Raised in Miami, Florida, she is currently an associate professor at the University of Nebraska in the Department of English and the Institute for Ethnic Studies. Her third book, a collection of essays called My Time Among the Whites (Picador, 2019), investigates, through a personal lens, concepts of race, gender, immigration, and the “American dream” since the 2016 election.