Orange Alert

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.

The first reading will take place in Kittredge Auditorium (HBC 032). The rest of the readings will take place in Gifford Auditorium (HBC 107). They will begin at 5:00 p.m. and will be preceded by a question-and-answer session starting at 4:00 p.m. All the readings are open to the public.

Spring 2024 Writers

Airea D. Matthews

Airea D. Matthews

January 31, 2024

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.

Anelise Chen

Anelise Chen, the Elise and Leonard Elman Visiting Writer

February 14, 2024

Anelise Chen is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Columbia University, where she is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her first novel, So Many Olympic Exertions, was published by Kaya Press in 2017. It was a VCU Cabell First Novelist Award Finalist. She is currently working on a second book, Clam Down (One World), based on her brief stint as the Paris Review Daily's "mollusk correspondent." She is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Awardee. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, The Believer, McSweeney's, BOMB, The New Republic, NPR, Village Voice, Conjunctions, and more.

Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka, the Don MacNaughton Reader

February 28, 2024

Photo by Polina Osherov

Born in Germany as part of a military family, Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Big Smoke was also a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His next collection, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017.

His mixed media collaboration with Nicholas Galanin and Kevin Neireiter inspired by Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge & Maggot Brain (Third Man Books), was published in 2021. His most recent collection of poems, Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), was a finalist for the UNT 2022 Rilke Prize and the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. His first graphic novel Last On His Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century was published in February 2023 by Liveright.

Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018-19. He currently lives in Chicago and is Editor of Poetry magazine.

Monica Brashears

Monica Brashears

March 20, 2024

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Monica Brashears is an Affrilachian writer from Tennessee. She is a graduate of Syracuse University's MFA program. Her work has appeared in Nashville Review, Split Lip Magazine, Appalachian Review, The Masters Review, and more. House of Cotton is her first novel, out 04.04.23.

Gina Nutt

Gina Nutt

April 3, 2024

Photo by David Nutt

Gina Nutt is the author of the essay collection Night Rooms (Two Dollar Radio), as well as the poetry collection Wilderness Champion and two chapbooks—Here Is My Adventure I Call it Alone and Ars Herzogica (dancing girl press). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in online and print journals, including Cosmonauts Avenue, Joyland, Ninth Letter, and Salt Hill. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She lives in Ithaca with her husband, the fiction writer David Nutt, their two cats, and dog. Online, Gina tends a creative mood ring—Late to the Party—on Tumblr and sends out a weekly newsletter via Substack—Kitsch Ocean.

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Lydia Millet, the Jane and Daniel Present Lecturer

April 24, 2024

Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also writes essays, opinion pieces, book reviews, and other ephemera and has worked as an editor and staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity since 1999. She lives in the desert outside Tucson with her family.