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Kirstin Valdez Quade 

Wednesday | Oct. 28, 2015 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut short story collection, Night at the Fiestas, was published by Norton to widespread acclaim. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Kyle Minor says the best of her stories are “legitimate masterpieces…haunting and beautiful. Quade attempts, page by page, to give up carefully held secrets, to hold them up to the light so we can get at the truth beneath, the existential truth. Perhaps this is as close as we can get to what is sacred in an age in which so many have otherwise rejected the idea of the sacred.” A “5 Under 35” honoree from the National Book Foundation and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award winner, Quade’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories.

Louise Glück

Wednesday | Nov. 11, 2015 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Louise Glück is the author of a book of essays and 16 books of poetry, including Faithful and Virtuous Night, winner of the 2014 National Book Award. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, poet Stephen Dobyns says, “The world [her poems] describe is a world from which we too often try to escape. No American poet writes better than Louise Glück; perhaps none can lead us so deeply into our own natures.” U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004, Glück has won the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes.

This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Nicholson Baker

Wednesday | Nov. 18, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | Ely Room, Wyndham Guest House

Nicholson Baker is the author of 10 novels and five books of nonfiction, including Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Writing in the New York Review of Books, critic Michael Dirda says, “Baker [is] a stunning writer…there is iron in his sentences as well as gold and filigree, there are shouts of warning, cries of dissent.” A frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the winner of the 2014 International Hermann Hesse Prize, Baker’s novel Traveling Sprinkler is a sequel to his 2009 bestseller The Anthologist. He is an alumnus of Haverford College.

Colson Whitehead

Wednesday | Feb. 3, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Novelist and essayist Colson Whitehead is the author of two books of nonfiction and five novels, including the post-apocalyptic fiction Zone One, a national bestseller. Writing in Time Magazine, novelist and critic Walter Kirn called Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, “the freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Whitehead’s book of nonfiction, The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death, an account of the 2011 World Series of Poker, was also published in paperback. Whitehead is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and the recipient of both a MacArthur Foundation grant and a Guggenheim fellowship.

Heather McHugh

Wednesday | Feb. 24, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Heather McHugh is the author of eight books of poems, including Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Book Review “Notable Book of the Year.” Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass says, “her writing is so alert to itself, so alert to language, it’s like watching a dancer on a mirrored floor, stepping on her steps. She’s practically playing with her words as she writes them down.” McHugh won a MacArthur Grant and was a finalist for the Pulitzer.

This reading was made possible with the support of the Jane Flanders Fund and the Marianne Moore Fund for the Study of Poetry.

Phillip Lopate

Wednesday | April 13, 2016 | 7:30 p.m. | Goodhart Music Room

Phillip Lopate is the author of more than a dozen books, including the essay collections Portrait Inside My Head, Getting Personal and Against Joie de Vivre. Lopate’s edited anthology The Art of the Personal Essay has been the standard volume of its kind since its publication more than 30 years ago. Of his work, critic Sven Birkerts says, “Lopate…registers with accuracy and tact the voice of a man of deep human impulse living in a civilization on the wane. His fearlessness is tonic, his candor is straight gin.”