Poet, Fiction Writer & Essayist Alina Stefanescu To Read at Whitman
By Pan Deines ’26
Whitman College’s Visiting Writers Reading Series welcomes poet, fiction writer and essayist Alina Stefanescu for a reading and Q&A session in Kimball Theatre at 7 p.m. on Nov. 13. The event is open to the public and will draw students and faculty interested in Creative Writing and the creative process.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and now lives in Birmingham, Alabama, with her family. Her debut fiction work, “Every Mask I Tried On” (Brighthorse Books, 2018) is a short story collection about American life as an immigrant that won the Brighthorse Book Prize in April 2018. Her hybrid poetry, fiction and essay collection “Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus” (Finishing Line Press, 2017) explores how we write, imagine and inhabit wombed bodies.
Stefanescu will read from her most recent work, a poetry collection called “My Heresies” (Sarabande Books, 2025), which delves into her personal and family history, described as “a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.” She is currently working on what she calls a “novel-like creature.”
Stefanescu’s poems, essays, fiction, and translations can be found in literary journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review and World Literature Today. Her writing has been collected in various anthologies, including “The Best American Poetry 2022” (Scribner, 2022), “The Best Small Fictions” (Sonder Press, 2021) and “Choice Words: Writers on Abortion” (Haymarket Press, 2020).
About the Series
The Visiting Writers Reading Series will bring five established and emerging writers to Whitman College over the course of the academic year. The 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.