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 Leonard in his 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.
Christopher Kennedy
September 11, 2024
Photo by Juliette Zyg
Christopher Kennedy is the author of The Strange God Who Makes Us (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2024); Clues from the Animal Kingdom (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2018); Ennui Prophet (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2011); Encouragement for a Man Falling to His Death (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2007), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; Trouble with the Machine (Low Fidelity Press, 2003); and Nietzsche’s Horse (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001). He is one of the translators of Light and Heavy Things: Selected Poems of Zeeshan Sahil, (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013), published as part of the Lannan Translation Series. His work has appeared in many print and on-line journals and magazines, including Ploughshares, The Progressive, Plume, New York Tyrant, Ninth Letter, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Mississippi Review, and McSweeney’s. In 2011, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He is a professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Syracuse University.
Daniel Magariel
September 25, 2024
Daniel Magariel is the author of One of the Boys and Walk the Darkness Down. His novels have been widely reviewed and translated into a dozen languages. He teaches at Columbia University.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths
October 9, 2024
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. Her collection of poetry and photography, Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton 2020), was selected as the winner of the 2021 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Poetry, the winner of the 2021 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a nominee for a 2020 NAACP Image award. She is the author of three other poetry collections—Lighting the Shadow (Four Way Books, 2015), which was selected as a finalist for the 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize and the 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry; The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press, 2011); Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2011), which was selected for the 2012 Inaugural Poetry Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association; and Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books 2010).
Griffiths is widely known for her literary portraits, fine art photography, and lyric videos. Her extensive video project, P.O.P (Poets on Poetry), an intimate series of micro-interviews, gathers nearly 100 contemporary poets in conversation, and is featured online by the Academy of American Poets. In 2020, she was selected as the Stella Adler Poet-in-Residence.
Hernan Diaz, the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer
October 30, 2024
Photo by Pascal Perich
Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in thirty-seven languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. His stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.
He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others.
He holds a PhD from NYU and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.
Donika Kelly, the Elise and Leonard Elman Visiting Writer
November 13, 2024
Photo by Ladan Osman
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, she has received an NEA fellowship, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Alexandra Chang
December 4, 2024
Photo by Alana Davis
Alexandra Chang is the author of Days of Distraction and Tomb Sweeping. She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. She currently lives in Ventura County, California with her husband, and their dog and cats.