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.

About Cynthia Lewis

Cynthia Lewis is the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Davidson College, where she has been teaching Shakespeare, Renaissance literature, and creative nonfiction since 1980. She has published numerous articles and two books on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the latest just out: "'The game’s afoot': A Sports Lover’s Introduction to Shakespeare."  Her creative nonfiction ranges in focus from American culture to personal essays and has been published in such venues as the Hudson Review, New Letters, the Antioch Review, Southern Cultures, the Massachusetts Review, and Charlotte Magazine.  Four of her essays have been cited as a “Notable Essay” in the Best American Essays series between 2006 and 2016. Her essay "Return Engagement: The Haunting of Hamlet and Dale Earnhardt, Jr." won Shenandoah’s Thomas Carter Essay Prize for 2016, and another essay, "Body Doubles," was awarded the 2017 Meringoff Prize for nonfiction by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.

About Andrew Rippeon

Andrew Rippeon is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program at Davidson College, and is the founder of the Davidson College Letterpress Lab.  Prior to joining the faculty at Davidson, Rippeon founded and directed the Alexander Hamilton Press at Hamilton College (NY). In his critical practice, Rippeon works at the intersections between sound studies, print-material culture, and recent and contemporary American literature, with a focus on poetry and poetics.  Recent and forthcoming critical works include essays and chapters on the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, sound-media and poetics in the early decades of the twentieth century, overlaps between typewriter and Twitter poetics and politics from the late 60s to the present, and the poet Larry Eigner and his audio-visual media consumption. Rippeon's scholarly edition of letters between Larry Eigner and his first major publisher, Jonathan Williams, is forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press in Fall 2019.  As a poet and printer, Rippeon is interested in activating the archives of knowledge, text, and experience that flicker just beyond recognition in our daily lives.  Formerly the editor of the poetics journal P-Queue and the chapbook series QUEUE (207 - 2011), Rippeon will read work from his books "Priest," "Porches," "Sampler," and his current work-in-progress, "Spirit Duplicator."

Corey Marks is the author of "Renunciation," a National Poetry Series selection, and "The Radio Tree," winner of the Green Rose Prize. His poems have appeared in New England Review, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He’s received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Natalie Ornish Prize from the Texas Institute for Letters, and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review. A University Distinguished Teaching Professor at University of North Texas in Denton, he directs the creative writing program for the Department of English. 

Corey will read poems from his two collections as well as some new work.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of two novels, "All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost" and "Inheritance," and a story collection, "Hunger." "Hunger" was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award and the winner of the Southern Review Fiction Prize. "Inheritance" won the PEN/Beyond Margins Prize for the Novel. Samantha’s short stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Plough shares, and The Best American Short Stories. She also received fellowships from the American Library in Paris, the Radcliffe Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She has taught fiction writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and at the MFA Program for Writing at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor of the Arts and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.