Saturday April 10, 2027 • 9am–4pm • Visual Arts Center Auditorium and Second Floor
Schedule details forthcoming.
Readers: Olivia Clare Friedman, Gabriel Reed, and Crystal Wilkinson
Olivia Clare Friedman has authored four books across multiple genres: the novel Here Lies (Grove Atlantic), the story collection Disasters in the First World (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic), and the poetry collections An Arm Fixed to a Wing (LSU Press) and The 26-Hour Day (New Issues). She serves as Director of Creative Writing and Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Gabriel Antonio Reed is a Tennessee poet who earned his MFA at Hollins University, a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and his BA with Honors from Carson-Newman University. He wrote Reach: A Poem, chosen by Brenda Hillman for the 2026 Academy of American Poets First Book Award (Graywolf Press, April 2027). His writing appears in Kenyon Review, Seneca Review, and Red Flag Poetry, and he serves as a poetry reader for Waxwing.
Crystal Wilkinson, the 2027 Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins and recent Writing Freedom fellow, is an award-winning writer whose works include the national-bestselling culinary memoir Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, the poetry collection Perfect Black, and three fiction titles: The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries. Her accolades include an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, and the Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has earned residencies and recognition from Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and The Hermitage Foundation. Her prose and poetry appear in The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, STORY, AGNI Literary Journal, Emergence, Oxford American, and Southern Cultures. Former Poet Laureate of Kentucky (2021–2023), she is the Bush-Holbrook Endowed Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. Her upcoming memoir, Heartsick, is forthcoming from Crown.
Sponsored by the Lex Allen Literary Endowment, Department of English and Creative Writing, and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund