Raymond Carver Reading Series
The Raymond Carver Reading Series features twelve to fourteen prominent writers yearly as part of a large undergraduate class taught by TAs from the Creative Writing Program. The readings have an extended question-and-answer session along with a reading. Recent authors include Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Jamaal May, Monica Youn, Brandon Taylor, Valeria Luiselli, Ilya Kaminsky, and Percival Everett.
Due to the generous support of Leonard and Elise Elman two distinguished authors each year spend two-day residencies at SU: the Richard Elman Visiting Writer and the Leonard and Elise Elman Visiting Writer. Learn more about the late Leonard Elman in this interview with Rob Enslin.
Past readings have been recorded and are in the process of being made available online by Bird Library at SUrface.
All readings take place in Slocum 214. They begin at 5:00 p.m. and are preceded by a question-and-answer session that begins at 4:00 p.m. They are open to the public.
Fall 2026 Writers
Aaron Fagan
September 9, 2026
Photo by Camilla Ha
Aaron Fagan is the author of Atom and Void (Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford, 2025), Pretty Soon (Pilot Press, London, 2023), A Better Place Is Hard to Find (The Song Cave, New York, 2020), Echo Train (Salt, London, 2010), and Garage (Salt, Cambridge, 2007). Poems have appeared, or are due to appear, in Autre, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Harper’s, Image, Liberties, Mutt Art Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Ursula (Hauser & Wirth). Book reviews have appeared in Artforum and The Economist.
Tiana Clark
September 23, 2026
Photo by Candace Hope
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025), which was named a finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards, and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She also wrote the chapbook Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.
Clark is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She has received scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies.
Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Clark is currently working on a memoir-in-essays, reckoning with Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art making, and exploring historical and contemporary methods of Black survival, which sold to Jenny Xu at Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster.
Alejandro Varela, the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer
October 7, 2026
Photo by Allison Michael Orenstein
Alejandro Varela (he/him) is based in New York. His work has appeared in the Boston, Yale, and Georgia Reviews, The Point Magazine, Harper's, and The Offing, among other publications.
His debut novel, The Town of Babylon (Astra House, 2022) was a finalist for the National Book Award. His short story collection, The People Who Report More Stress (Astra, 2023), was a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards, and longlisted for the Aspen Literary Prize, the Story Prize, and the Jean Stein Awards. His latest novel, Middle Spoon, was published by Viking on September 9, 2025.
Varela is an editor-at-large of Apogee Journal, and holds a masters degree in public health from the University of Washington.
Christopher Kennedy
October 28, 2026
Christopher Kennedy is the author of the novel Stealing Marquee Moon (Rose Books), six poetry collections, Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd.), Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd.), Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award in 2007, Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press), and Nietzsche's Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press). He is also one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil (BOA Editions, Ltd.), published in 2013 as part of The Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, Epoch, The Threepenny Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, and New York Tyrant. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. He is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University.
Hanif Abdurraqib, the Elise and Leonard Elman Visiting Writer
November 11, 2026
Photo by Megan Leigh Barnard
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Frankie Barnet
December 2, 2026
Frankie Barnet is the author of Mood Swings, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the 2025 Sunburst Award and longlisted for the 2025 Leacock Medal for Humour; An Indoor Kind of Girl; and Kim: A Novel Idea. She has an MFA from Syracuse University and lives in Montreal.