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.

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. 

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.

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, REGISTERS OF ILLUMINATED VILLAGES (Graywolf, 2018) and SEAM (SIU, 2014). Tarfia’s writing appears widely in the U.S. and abroad in the Daily Star, Hindu Business Line, BuzzFeed, PBS News Hour, Huffington Post, Poetry Magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Academy of American Poets, Oxford American, the New Republic, the Nation, Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket, 2019), and has been displayed at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere.

The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, and other honors, Tarfia presents work at institutions and organizations worldwide, and has been featured at the the Liberation War Museum of Bangladesh, the Library of Congress, the Fulbright Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, the Radcliffe Seminars, NYU, Barnard, UC Berkeley, the Poetry Foundation, the Clinton School of Public Service, Brac University, and elsewhere.

Tarfia’s writing is translated into Bengali, Persian, Chinese, and Tamil, and is part of the theater production Birangona: Women of War. Tarfia’s collaborations include photographers, producers, composers, filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists, resulting in several interdisciplinary projects, including an EP, Eat More Mango. In 2016, Tarfia was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. Born in Brooklyn, NY to Bangladeshi immigrants and raised in Texas, Tarfia lives in Chicago.