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.
Spring 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.
Davidson’s own literary geniuses share some of their own uninhibited contributions to the written tradition.
Three multitalented and productive writers of the Davidson College literary community will be celebrating their upcoming publications. Join them for an evening of reading and celebration!
Hilary Green, the James B. Duke Professor of Africana Studies, is most recently the author of Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War which will be published by Fordham University Press on February 25, 2025.
Alan Michael Parker, Chair & Douglas Houchens Professor of English, is most recently the author of Bingo Bango Boingo which will be published by Dzanc Books on February 25, 2025.
Sarah Perry, incoming 2026 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, is most recently the author of Sweet Nothings: Confessions of a Candy Lover which will be published by Mariner Books/Harper Collins on February 4, 2025.
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.
Gabriel Fried, author of three collections of poetry, will read selections from his most recent publication, No Small Thing. He is the longtime poetry editor for Persea Books and Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri.
"Fried erects poetry in each humid landscape of our feverish lives. And the roaming world of childhood to which No Small Thing returns us is one where shapes and selves may shift in one blessed blink. Defter than nostalgia, slyer than sentiment, the voices of these poems cast just so many spells of indeterminacy. Behind their looking glass, Gabriel Fried guides us down the corridors where sociality and gender, religion and ethnicity, language and identity negotiate their forms." ~Four Way Books
Three multitalented and productive writers of the Davidson College literary community will be celebrating their upcoming publications. Join them for an evening of reading and celebration!
Sherrie Flick, the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, is most recently the author of I Have Not Considered the Consequences: Short Stories which will be published by Autumn House Press on April 15, 2025.
Jack Saebyok Jung, Assistant Professor of English, is most recently the author of Hocus Pocus Bogus Locus which will be published by Black Square Editions on March 15, 2025.
Robert Hudson Vincent, Assistant Professor of English, is most recently the author of The English Baroque in Early Modern Literature which will be published by Edinburgh University Press on February 28, 2025.
Past Presenters
Jackie Shelton Green
Clint Smith
Margaret Atwood
Don Delillo
Claudia Rankine
Salman Rushdie