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 Watson Theater in Watson Hall. 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.
Spring 2026 Writers
CAConrad, the Richard Elman Visiting Writer
January 28, 2026
Photo by Matthew Thompson
CAConrad has been writing poems for more than 50 years and working with (Soma)tic poetry rituals for over 20 years. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award. The Book of Frank is available in 9 different languages, most recently French and Italian. They also exhibit poems as sculpture with recent shows in London, Hamburg, Melbourne, Porto, Santander, and Tucson. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute and De Ateliers in Amsterdam. Please visit them online at https://CAConrad.com
Alexander Sammartino
February 11, 2026
Photo by Jonathan Aprea
Alexander Sammartino was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Arizona. He received his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and cat. His debut novel, Last Acts, won the 2025 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was chosen as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. Last Acts is available from Scribner in the US and Pushkin ONE in the UK. Sammartino teaches first-year comp at the New York City College of Technology and he is the fiction editor for Italian Americana. His next novel, Gallo, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Jamel Brinkley, the Elise and Leonard Elman Visiting Writer
February 25, 2026
Photo by Daniele Molajoli
Jamel Brinkley is the author of Witness: Stories (2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux/4th Estate), winner of the Maya Angelou Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. A Lucky Man: Stories (2018, Graywolf Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, The Yale Review, Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, The Believer, and Tin House, and has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories. He was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow (Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing), a Wallace Stegner Fellow (Stanford University), and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters), the Rome Prize in Literature, and an O. Henry Award. His work has also received support from the Lannan Foundation and Loghaven Artist Residency (Aslan Foundation). Raised in Brooklyn and the Bronx, he divides his time between Iowa City and New York, and teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
River Selby
March 18, 2026
River Selby was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. They are a first generation high-school and college graduate. They worked as a wildland firefighter for seven years, stationed out of California, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska.
They are currently a Kingsbury and Legacy Fellow at Florida State University, where they are pursuing their PhD in Nonfiction with an emphasis in postcolonial histories, North American colonization, and postmodern literature and culture. River has spent nearly a decade researching the history of fire suppression in the United States, Indigenous fire and land-tending practices, climate change impacts, and ecological adaptations across North American landscapes. Their research is informed by their extensive field experience.
They hold an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University, and a BA in English and Textual Studies from the same institution, where they served as a Remembrance Scholar before graduating summa cum laude, with honors. River also received a Critical Language Scholarship for Hindi and served as a Fulbright ETA in the Czech Republic.
Hotshot: A Life on Fire is their first book. Subscribe to their newsletter, GATHERING.
January Gill O’Neil
April 1, 2026
Photo by John Andrews
January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, and American Poetry Review. A Cave Canem fellow, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member, and she teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English
Mona Awad
April 22, 2026
Photo by Angela Sterling
Mona Awad is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. She is a three-time finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, the recipient of an Amazon Best First Novel Award, and a two-time finalist for the Giller Prize. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University and divides her time between La Jolla and Boston. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s and TIME magazine, among others. Her latest novel, We Love You, Bunny, was an instant New York Times bestseller. It is currently a finalist for the Giller prize.