Writers-in-Residence and Public Readings
The New York State Summer Writers Institute will offer evening readings by an extraordinary line-up of distinguished writers this June and July. The 2025 readings will be free and open to the public, except where noted. Click here for a PRINT version of the 2025 schedule.
Public Events Schedule 2025:
Monday June 23, 8 PM: Elizabeth Benedict (fiction) & Binnie Kirshenbaum (fiction) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Tuesday June 24, 8 PM: Garth Greenwell (fiction) and Megan Fernandes (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Wednesday June 25, 8 PM: Honor Moore (non-fiction) & Hannah Assadi (fiction) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Thursday June 26, 8.00 PM: Phillip Lopate (non-fiction) & Rosanna Warren (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Friday June 27, 8 PM: Queer Poetry: Reading & Conversation w/ Tom Healy & others, Tang Museum
Sunday June 29, 3 PM: Student Reading, Davis Auditorium
Monday June 30, 8 PM: Claire Messud (fiction) & Sandra Lim (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Tuesday July 1, 8 PM: Jerald Walker (non-fiction) & Campbell McGrath (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Wednesday July 2, 6:30 PM: Film Screening, Pedro Almodovar “Bad Education” ("Maleducacion") followed by 8:30 Panel/Conversation with Jim Miller (author of the new book The Passion of Pedro Almodovar), Phillip Lopate and Robert Boyers, Davis Auditorium. Film also available on Amazon Prime and other platforms.
Thursday July 3, 8 PM: Vinson Cunningham (fiction) & April Bernard (poetry) Reading, Caffè Lena; tickets required
Friday July 4, 8 PM: Jim Shepard (fiction) & Chase Twichell (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Monday July 7, 8 PM: Novelist Mary Gaitskill: A Conversation with Robert Boyers, Davis Auditorium
Tuesday July 8, 8 PM: Amy Hempel (fiction) & Peg Boyers (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Wednesday July 9, 8 PM: Poetry & Jazz: Robert Pinsky, Todd Coolman and others, Caffè Lena; tickets required
Thursday July 10, 8 PM: Francine Prose (fiction) & Ishion Hutchinson (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Friday July 11, 8 PM: Rick Moody (fiction) & Adam Braver (fiction) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Sunday July 13, 3 PM: Student Reading, Davis Auditorium
Monday July 14, 8 PM: Thomas Chatterton Williams (memoir) & Steve Stern (fiction) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Tuesday July 15, 8 PM: NY Times Columnist John McWhorter: A Conversation on Politics, Language & The Culture Wars with Robert Boyers, Davis Auditorium
Wednesday July 16, 8 PM: Jamaica Kincaid (fiction) & Susan Minot (fiction) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Thursday July 17, 8 PM: Joyce Carol Oates (fiction) & Henri Cole (poetry) Reading, Davis Auditorium
Friday July 18, 8 PM: Reading and Panel on Memoir: Why Write About Yourself? With Memoirists Laura Kipnis, Melora Wolff and Robert Boyers, Davis Auditorium
*tickets required, visit Caffe Lena for details.
2025 Writers-in-Residence:
HannahLillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Called a writer who is “wise and poetic” by Publishers Weekly, Assadi’s third novel, Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in
2026. She teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute.
April Bernard's sixth book of poems, The World Behind the World, has just been published by W.W. Norton; previous collections are Brawl & Jag, Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye, which won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her novels are Pirate Jenny and Miss Fuller; she has also published short fiction in Little Star, Electric Literature, and The Southampton Review. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other journals, she is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Skidmore College
as well as a faculty member of the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.
Mary Gaitskill is the author of three novels (The Mare, Veronica and Two Girls, Fat and Thin) and three collections of short stories (Bad Behavior, Don’t Cry and Because They Wanted To), Mary Gaitskill is one of the most celebrated writers in the country. Her most recent
books include a collection of essays (Somebody With A Little Hammer) and a controversial novella called This Is Pleasure which appeared in a summer 2019 issue of The New Yorker Magazine. Stacey D’Erasmo wrote of her in The NY Times Book Review that “Ambiguity—the inseparability of light and darkness, love and pain, nurture
and destruction, progress and regress—is her métier. The question she seems to ask
again and again, and with astonishing force…is how to feel, how we do feel.” She has taught at the summer writers institute for seventeen years.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His second book, Cleanness, was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications. His most recent novel,
Small Rain, published in 2024, tells the story of how a medical crisis brings one man close
to death―and to love, art, and beauty. It is a work that The Washington Post described as “profound . . . a paean to some of life’s most meaningful pleasures.”
An alum of the Writer’s Institute, Greenwell also writes regularly about books, music,
and film for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. 
Tom Healy is the author of three books of poetry, Velvet, Animal Spirits and What the Right Hand Knows, which was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary
Award. He has taught on the faculties of NYU, The Pratt Institute and The New School. 
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and is author of the poetry collections School of Instructions: a Poem, House of Lords and Commons and Far District and the book of essays, Fugitive Tilts. Among his recognitions are the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a
Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce
Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.
Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. 
Jamaica Kincaid is the author of many books, including Mr. Potter (described by Robert Boyers as “a perfect, perfectly heartbreaking novel”), Lucy, At The Bottom of the River, Annie John, My Brother, A Small Place, Autobiography
of My Mother, and other books. Her most recent novel is See Now Then. Kincaid is described as follows in The New York Times: “She has the gift of endowing common experience with a mythic ferocity... She is
one of our most scouringly vivid writers.”
Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic/essayist and former video artist whose work focuses on sexual
politics, aesthetics, shame, emotion, acting out, moral messiness, and various other
crevices of the American psyche. Her seven books include Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, and Against Love: A Polemic; her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Atlantic, The
New Republic, Harper’s, Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere, and are included in The Best American Essays 2016 (ed. Jonathan Franzen) and 2023 (ed. Vivian Gornick), and in The Contemporary American Essay (ed. Phillip Lopate). She’s a professor emerita in the Dept. of Radio-TV-Film at Northwestern
University, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows, the NEA and Yaddo. 
John McWhorter is a regular columnist for The New York Times whose most recent book is WOKE RACISM: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He has taught linguistics, American Studies, and classes in the Core Curriculum program
at Columbia University, since 2008 where he is currently an Associate Professor in
the English and Comparative Literature department. He was Contributing Editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014. From 2006 to 2008 he was a columnist for the New York Sun and he has written columns regularly for The Root, The New York Daily News, The Daily Beast, CNN and Time Ideas. He has published a number of books on linguistics and on race
relations, of which the better known are Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why You Should, Like,
Care, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. He makes regular public radio and television appearances on related subjects.
James Miller is Professor of Politics and Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research
in New York City. His latest book is The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar (2024). Other books include Can Democracy Work?, From Ancient Athens to Our World (2018); Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (2011); Flowers in the Dustbin: The Rise of Rock’n’Roll (1999); The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993); and Democracy is in the Streets (1987). The former executive editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, he was also for ten years
a general editor at Newsweek magazine, where he covered books and music.
Honor Moore 's newest book, Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury, was published on by W.W. Norton on March 10. Moore’s previous memoir, The Bishop’s Daughter, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Los Angeles Times
Favorite Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and many other journals and anthologies. For the Library of America, she edited
Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement, an Oprah Summer Reading List pick. She has been poet-in-residence at Wesleyan University
and the University of Richmond, visiting professor at the Columbia School of the Arts,
and three times the Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program
at the University of Iowa. When still in her twenties, Mourning Pictures, her play in verse about her mother’s death, was produced on Broadway. The White Blackbird, A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, published in 1996 and recently reissued, was a New York Times Notable Book. She
lives and writes in New York, where she is on the graduate writing faculty of The
New School.
Joyce Carol Oates won the National Book Award for her novel them and has since written dozens of novels and short story collections that have made
her one of the most celebrated writers of her generation. Among her best known works
are Blonde, We Were The Mulvaneys, Zombie and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. The Falls won the 2005 Prix Femina as the best novel in France. John Updike wrote of her in
The New Yorker: “If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, Joyce Carol Oates would be, foremost
in this country, entitled to it.” Apart from her many works of fiction, Oates has
also written acclaimed books of poetry and a number of books of non-fiction and memoir,
the best known of which are On Boxing and A Widow’s Tale.
Robert Pinsky was the Poet-Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2002, and is the author of
many books of poetry and prose. His books of poetry include The Figured Wheel, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, Gulf Music and others. His translation of Dante’s Inferno was a national best-seller, and his latest book, a memoir, is called Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet. He teaches at Boston University.
Francine Prose is the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including Guided Tours of Hell, Primitive People, and Bigfoot Dreams. Her novel, Blue Angel, was hailed in Publishers Weekly as “a peerlessly accomplished performance…timelessly funny,” and in Mademoiselle
as a “funny yet devastating novel that will rock literary and academic worlds alike.”
Prose is a contributing editor of Harper’s and writes for The New Yorker, Gentleman’s Quarterly, and Atlantic Monthly. Recent books include The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & The Artists They Inspired, Caravaggio, and A Changed Man. Other recent titles include the novels Goldengrove and Lovers at the Chameleon Club. Her recent non-fiction books include Reading Like A Writer, and Anne Frank. (Photo by Frances F. Denny.)
Jim Shepard has written eight novels, and six story collections. Of his most recent novel, Phase Six, The New York Times Book Review writes that “Shepard has managed to make art out of our crisis with a thought-provoking
work of fiction that sustains our emotions.” As “one of this country’s greatest fiction
writers” (NPR), Shepard’s short stories have been chosen for Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O, Henry Prize Stories, and for The Pushcart Prize, and his collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway was a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. He lives in Williamstown,
Massachusetts, with his wife, three children, and three beagles.
Steve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such
as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. “An ebullient
maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience” (Booklist), he has won two Pushcart
Prizes, an O’Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book
Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at Skidmore College. He has also been a Fulbright
lecturer at Bar Elan University in Tel Aviv, the Moss Chair of Creative Writing at
the University of Memphis, and Lecturer in Jewish Studies for the Prague Summer Seminars.
Stern splits his time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, New York. His most recent
novel is A Fool’s Kabbalah (2025). Photo by Sabrina Jones.
Chase Twichell has published eight books of poetry, most recently Things As It Is and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, which won both the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University
and the Balcones Poetry Prize from Austin Community College. After teaching for many
years, she left academia to start Ausable Press, an important publisher of contemporary
poetry that was absorbed by Copper Canyon in 2009. A student in the Mountains and
Rivers Order at Zen Mountain Monastery, Twichell’s writing often reflects her spiritual
practice. “Zen,” she says, “is said to be a ‘mind-to-mind transmission.’ The best
poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain
exactly how they did it.”
Jerald Walker's collection How to Make a Slave and Other Essays was a Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Nonfiction, in which the judges
noted how it "shows us something knotty, fraught, and unforgettable, not just about
race and the commonplace, 'living while black,' but about living while human. Walker
is furious and funny. He is talking to himself about his life and allows us to listen
in.” Also the winner of the 2020 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, Walker is
the author of two previous books of nonfiction.
Melora Wolff is the author of a memoir-in-essays, Bequeath (LSU Press 2024), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography/Memoir;
and of The Parting, a collection of prose poems. Her work has appeared in Brick, the Chronicle Review, the New York Times, the Normal School, Salmagundi, the Southern Review, Speculative Nonfiction; in the anthologies Best American Fantasy and Every Father’s Daughter: 24 Women Writers Remember Their Fathers; and in many other publications. She has held fellowships from the New York Foundation
for the Arts and the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. A former Associate
Director of the NY State Summer Writers Institute, she is Associate Professor of English
and Director of Creative Writing at Skidmore College.
Faculty bios can be found here: