Delbrook Visiting Writers Series

Victoria Chang
Forward Prize and PEN/Voelcker Award Winner for Poetry
Event Date: Wednesday, September 17 at 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts

Victoria Chang is a Taiwanese American poet, essayist, multimedia artist, and children’s author whose writing often includes themes about living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. Her most recent book of poems With My Back to the World (2024) received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, Lithub, and Electric Literature. Prior to that publication, her poetry collection The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022) was named one of the “Best Books of 2022” by the New Yorker and The Guardian. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021) was named a favorite nonfiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus and OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. OBIT was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Chang has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is currently the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.

Catherine Lacey
Whiting Award Winner for Fiction
Event Date: Wednesday, October 1 at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
Co-Sponsored by LGBTQIA+ Faculty & Staff Community and Golden Hour Books

Catherine Lacey was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. She is the author of six books, most recently The Möbius Book and Biography of X. Lacey’s debut novel, Nobody Is Ever Missing, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award and a winner of the 2016 Whiting Award. Her writing was described as “dreamy and fierce at the same time” by Dwight Garner of The New York Times. Her novel Pew was shortlisted for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction, among other accolades.

Lacey earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. She has served as the University of Montana’s Kittredge Visiting Writer and the John & Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at The University of Mississippi. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She currently lives in México City with her husband, poet, essayist, and novelist Daniel Saldaña París.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine
National Book Award and PEN/Bingham Prize Finalist
Event Date: Tuesday, October 14 at 7:30 PM
Location: Schrott Center for the Arts

Kali Fajardo-Anstine is an award-winning novelist who draws from her Southern Colorado heritage and life experiences living across the American West. Her writing and lectures reflect her own heritage as a Colorado Chicana with roots in Indigenous, Latina, and Filipino cultures and her books feature the Indigenous and Latino people of Colorado.

She is a National Book Award Finalist for her debut story collection, Sabrina & Corina. Additionally, Sabrina & Corina was a finalist for the Story Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, and the winner of the American Book Award. Fajardo-Anstine’s first novel, Woman of Light, was hailed as “A feat of old-school storytelling” by The Guardian. It is a national bestseller and was selected as a Good Morning America Book Buzz pick in October 2022.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine earned her MFA from the University of Wyoming and has lived across the country, from Durango, Colorado, to Key West, Florida. She was the 2022-2024 Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at Texas State University and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Safiya Sinclair
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Autobiography and Whiting Award Winner for Poetry
Event Date: Wednesday, November 5 at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium
Co-sponsored by Global and Historical Studies

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir How to Say Babylon which was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Kirkus Prize. How to Say Babylon was named a Best Book of the Year by numerous publications, individuals, and organizations, such as President Barack Obama, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time, NPR, and others. Plus, it was a Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club pick. The audiobook of How to Say Babylon also received recognition and was named a Best Audiobook of the Year by Audible and AudioFile magazine. Sinclair is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the Seamus Heaney First Book Award in the UK, and was longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Sigrid Nunez
National Book Award Winner for Fiction
Event Date: Monday, November 17 at 7:30 PM
Location: Shelton Auditorium

Sigrid Nunez is the distinguished author of nine novels, the first of which was published when she was in her 40’s. Born and raised in New York City, she’s the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father. Nunez grew up in the projects, went on to study English at Barnard College, and later got a master of fine arts from Columbia University.

Her body of work includes the novels A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award, was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been adapted into a film. Her 2020 novel What Are You Going Through has also been recently adapted into the Golden Lion-winning film The Room Next Door by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

Wyatt Mason of The New York Times Magazine referred to Nunez as a “master of noticing” who “smuggles profound reflections on pain and loss into novels of deceptive lightness.” Nunez’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her internationally loved work has been translated in over 30 languages.

Nunez has taught at Columbia, Princeton, and the New School, and has been a visiting writer or writer in residence at Boston University, Amherst, Smith, Baruch, Vassar, Syracuse, and the University of California, Irvine, among others. She lives in New York City.