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 2026–2027 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
Jenny Browne
Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Jenny Browne is the author of “I Am Trying to Love the Whole World” (BOA Editions, 2026). Her previous poetry collections “Dear Stranger,” “The Second Reason” and “At Once” are published by the University of Tampa Press. Her writing has appeared widely in literary journals including The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Tin House and Threepenny Review.
Browne was the 2016–2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate and the 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate. A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, she has received grants from the San Antonio Artist Foundation, the Texas Writers League and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, she was the Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens University in Belfast, and returned in 2024 as Fulbright in Irish Literature.
Phillip B. Williams
Thursday, Oct. 29, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Phillip B. Williams is the author of the poetry collections “MUTINY” (Penguin, 2021), winner of the 2022 American Book Award and “Thief in the Interior” (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Other works include the chapbooks “Burn” (YesYes books, 2013) and “Bruised Gospels” (Arts in Bloom Inc., 2011); and the novel “Ours” (Viking Books, 2024).
Williams is the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Rice University.
Sam Ligon & Kate Lebo
Thursday, Nov. 12, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Samuel Ligon’s most recent novel “Miller Cane: A True and Exact History” was serialized for a year in Spokane’s weekly newspaper, The Inlander, as well as on Spokane Public Radio, before being published in revised and expanded form by Slant Books in 2026. Other published works include two novels, “Among the Dead and Dreaming” and “Safe in Heaven Dead,” and two collections of stories, “Wonderland,” illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and “Drift and Swerve.”
Kate Lebo is an essayist, cookbook writer, and poet. Her first collection of nonfiction, “The Book of Difficult Fruit” (FSG, 2021), won the Washington State Book Award. Sasquatch Books released a revised and expanded edition of her cookbook “Pie School” in 2023. Other recent work includes the chapbook “Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers” (Entre Rios Books, 2018) and the anthology “Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze” (Sasquatch Books, 2017), which she edited with Samuel Ligon.
Fatimah Asghar
Thursday, February 25, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Fatimah Asghar is an American poet, director and screenwriter. Co-creator and writer for the Emmy-nominated webseries “Brown Girls,” their work has appeared in Poetry, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and other publications.
Asghar received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2017 and has been featured on the Forbes “30 Under 30” list.
Chen Chen
Thursday, April 22, 7 p.m.
Hunter Conservatory, Kimball Theatre
Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency” (2022) and “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” (2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook is “Explodingly Yours” (Ghost City Press, 2023). His honors include two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester, New York, and teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College, Stonecoast and Antioch.