Visiting Writers Series
About the Visiting Writers Reading Series
The Visiting Writers Reading Series brings established and emerging writers to share their work with the community. The Visiting Writers Reading Series is sponsored by the Department of English, the Office of the Provost and Dean of the Faculty, the Lawrence Parke Murphy and Robert Goldstein Trust, and by generous donations from the extended Whitman community.
Information about the events in the 2025–2026 series can be found below. For more information about upcoming events in the series, please see the campus calendar.
View an archive of past Visiting Writers Events.
Schedule of Events
Octavio Quintanilla
Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press, 2025).
He is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas.
His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely, including in the Mexican Cultural Institute in San Antonio, Texas, El Paso Museum of Art, Southwest School of Art, Presa House Gallery, Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, and in the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center / Black Box Theater in Austin, Texas. His poetry and Frontextos can be found in public spaces such as at the San Antonio Labor Plaza and at Poet’s Pointe. Quintanilla is also the recipient of the Nebrija Creadores Scholarship which allowed him a month-long residency at the Instituto Franklin at Alcalá University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. He holds a doctorate from the University of North Texas and teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Alina Stefanescu
Thursday, Nov. 13, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Poet/fiction writer/essayist Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. My Heresies, a poetry collection, was published by Sarabande in late April 2025. Other recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Stefanescu’s poems, essays and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review and others. She serves as editor, reviewer and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature.
Sabrina Orah Mark
Thursday, March 5, 2026, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Sabrina Orah Mark is an award-winning writer & poet. Happily, her most recent collection of essays on fairytales and motherhood, which began as a monthly column in The Paris Review, recently won a National Jewish Book Award.
Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Mark earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Doctorate in English from the University of Georgia. She is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum, and The Babies (winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize). Her collection of stories, Wild Milk, won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction.
Mark’s accomplishments include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, and a Creative Capital Award. In addition to teaching private workshops, she currently teaches nonfiction, fiction and poetry for the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, Reginald McKnight, and their two sons.
Kevin Prufer
Thursday, April 9, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Kevin Prufer is the 2026 Texas Poet Laureate. His newest poetry collection, The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) received the 2024 Rilke Prize. His new novel Sleepaway (Acre Books, 2024) was declared a "small press gem" by the Los Angeles Times. He is also the author of several other books of poetry, including The Art of Fiction (2021), How He Loved Them (2018), Churches (2014), In a Beautiful Country (2011) and National Anthem (2008), all from Four Way Books. He has edited several volumes of poetry, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008; w/ Wayne Miller), Literary Publishing in the 21st Century (Milkweed Editions, 2016; w/ Wayne Miller & Travis Kurowski), and Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf Press, 2017; w/Martha Collins). With Wayne Miller and Martin Rock, Prufer directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little known authors to new generations of readers through the annual republication of a large body of each author’s work, printed alongside essays, photographs and ephemera.
Prufer is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the low-residency MFA at Lesley University. Among Prufer’s awards and honors are five Pushcart prizes and several Best American Poetry selections, numerous awards from the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. His poetry collection How He Loved Them was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book of 2018 from the American literary press. Born in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio, Kevin Prufer studied at Wesleyan University (BA), Hollins College (MA) and Washington University (MFA).
Maya Jewell Zeller
Thursday, April 23, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Maya Jewell Zeller (educator, essayist, poet) is the author of Raised by Ferns (spring 2026); The Wonder of Mushrooms (AdventureKEEN, fall 2025); out takes/ glove box, chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize (2023); as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017); the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015); and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She is co-author, with Kathryn Nuernberger, of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Literary, 2024), and co-editor, with Sharma Shields, of the multi-genre anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales and Verses from the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Zeller’s prose appears in The Rumpus, Diagram, Brevity, Bellingham Review, Booth Journal, and in several anthologies, including the NY-Times bestselling This is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Environmental and Nature Writing (Bloomsbury 2025). Additionally, her essay “Scavenger Panorama” was selected by Vivian Gornick as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Fellowship from Artist Trust, and a Residencies in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and Centrum’s Port Townsend Campus at Fort Worden, Zeller has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford (where she was a fellow in Spring 2024, as well as a visiting poet in Spring 2019) and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. She is Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for Western Colorado’s low-residency MFA.