novel excerpt

Leslie Scalapino reads work appearing in The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion (1997) and Way (1988).

Jonathan Penner reads from Going Blind (1977) as well as work published in periodicals.

Maxine Chernoff reads widely from Leap Year Day: New and Selected Poems (1990). In addition to poems and prose poems published over several decades, she reads work that would later be published in World: Poems 1991-2001 (2001). She closes the reading with a short story from Signs of Devotion (1993) and an excerpt from her then-unpublished novel American Heaven (1996).

Marilynne Robinson reads from her novel Housekeeping (1981).

Joy Williams reads from the final section of her fifth novel, Harrow (2021), sharing a stream-of-consciousness passage from the perspective of Jeffrey, a precocious, ten-year-old judge presiding in a post-apocalyptic future. This reading was presented as part of the Distinguished Visitors in Creative Writing Series.

Natasha Wimmer reads her translations from the Spanish of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, Mexican novelist Álvaro Enrigue, and Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño. She opens with a translation-in-progress of Dalton's poems written in 1970s Cuba before turning to Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires (2024), a novel about the Spanish conquistadors' stay in Tenochtitlan in 1519. She closes with an excerpt from Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives (2007), which follows fictional young poets in Mexico City.