Great Writers, Great Readings: Past Authors

Spring 2024

Elizabeth Schmermund
Schmermund is a poet, essayist, and professor. Her work has appeared in The Independent, Mantis, and Gyroscope Review, among other venues. Her first poetry chapbook, Alexander the Great, is published by Finishing Line Press. She lives in New York with her family and is currently an assistant professor of English at SUNY Old Westbury.

Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez has published nine novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, The Friend, What Are You Going Through, and, most recently, The Vulnerables. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Nunez’s other honors include a Whiting Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

Fall 2023

George M. Johnson
Award-winning Black non-binary writer, author, and activist. They are the New York Times bestselling author of All Boys Aren’t Blue and We Are Not Broken. They were named to the 2022 TIME100 Next, TIME‘s annual list of rising stars across industries, and they were nominated for an Emmy award for their dramatic reading of All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Adrienne Brodeur
Author of the novel Little Monsters and the memoir Wild Game, which was selected as a "Best Book of the Year" by NPR and The Washington Post and is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute.

Samuel G. Freedman
Former columnist for The New York Times and a professor at Columbia University. Author of acclaimed books, including the newly-released Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights, described by Jon Meacham as “a compelling and important account of Humphrey’s critical role in the freedom struggles of the mid-20th century.”

Kelly McMasters, Martha McPhee, Kristal Brent Zook
Hofstra professors and authors discuss their recently published memoirs. Watch this event.

Spring 2023

Wanting: Women Writing About Desire
Guthart Cultural Center Theater
with co-editor Kelly McMasters and contributors Aracelis Girmay and Domenica Ruta. Watch this reading

Phillis Levin and Christie Ann Reynolds '05
Phillis Levin is the author of five poetry collections, including Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Levin has completed her sixth collection and is working on a memoir. (Photo ©Sigrid Estrada)

Christie Ann Reynolds is the author of Revenge for Revenge and The New School Press chapbook idiot heart and Girl Boy Girl Boy (Corresponding Society). Watch this reading

Fall 2022

Ralph Savarese
Essayist, poet, scholar and activist, whose most recent book is See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press 2018). 2007's Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption (Other Press), won an Independent Publishers Gold Medal. Watch his reading

Joanna Rakoff
Author of the international bestselling memoir My Salinger Year and the novel A Fortunate Age, winner of the Goldberg Prize for Fiction, the Elle Readers’ Prize, and a San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller. Rakoff’s books have been translated into 20 languages and nominated for major prizes in The Netherlands and France. Watch her reading

Rachel Hadas
Poet, essayist, and translator. Among the more recent of her many books are two volumes of poetry, Pandemic Almanac (2022), Love and Dread (2021), and a book of essays, Piece by Piece (2021). She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Michelle Hart
A member of Hofstra’s Class of 2011, Hart was the assistant books editor at O, the Oprah Magazine and Oprah Daily. Her first novel, We Do What We Do in the Dark (May 2022), received praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and TIME, among others. Watch her reading

Spring 2022

Edwidge Danticat
Recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and author of Claire of the Sea Light, a New York Times notable book; Brother, I’m Dying, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner and National Book Award finalist; and Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection.of the essay collection Trick Mirror.

Jason Schneiderman
Author of four books of poems, including Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile.

Fall 2021

Larissa Pham
Essayist and critic whose work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, Bookforum, Guernica, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her 2021 essay collection, Pop Song, is about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person.
Watch Her Reading.

Joshua Henkin
Author of Morningside Heights (2021), selected by the American Booksellers Association as the #1 Indie Next Pick and named an Editors' Choice Book by The New York Times. He is the author of Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book; Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book; and The World Without You, named an Editors' Choice Book by The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune.
Watch His Reading.

Connie Roberts
A 2010 recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for her manuscript Not the Delft School. Her poetry collection, Little Witness (Arlen House, 2015), was inspired by her experiences growing up in an industrial school (orphanage) in the Irish midlands. Roberts is a Hofstra Adjunct Assistant Professor of English.
Watch Her Reading.