Sponsored by the School of Arts and Humanities, the Marcia Kinsey Visiting Writers Series brings award-winning writers to campus to read from their work, talk about their writing, and interact with our students.
Both the St. Edward's and the larger Austin community benefit from the novelists, poets, and playwrights who come to campus. These working artists inspire students and add dimension to professors' curriculum. For more information about the Marcia Kinsey Visiting Writers Series, please contact Associate Professor Sasha West or Associate Professor Mary Helen Specht.
Elisa Gonzalez
October 8, 2024 at 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)
Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Yale University and the New York University MFA program, she has received fellowships from the Norman Mailer Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rolex Foundation, and U.S. Fulbright Program. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Award. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour was named one of the best books of 2023 by The New Yorker. FSG will also bring out her novel, The Awakenings, and a nonfiction book, Strangers on Earth.
Alejandro Puyana
November 7, 2024 at 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)
Alejandro Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His recently released debut novel Freedom is a Feast has already won the Westport Prize for Literature. Puyana’s work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The American Scholar, and elsewhere, and his story “Hands of Dirty Children” was reprinted in Best American Short Stories. He lives with his wife and daughter in Austin, Texas.
Timothy Braun
February 11, 2025 at 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)
Timothy Braun’s plays and operas have been performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia, including "Sherlock Holmes and The Internet of Things," at Lincoln Center. His play “Three, or The Sound of The Great Existential Nothingness” was the winner of the David Mark Cohen New Play Award. His essays have been published by The New York Times, Huffington Post, The Texas Standard, Austin Monthly, American Theatre Magazine, among others. He has been a awarded numerous residencies, including by the MacDowell, Djerassi, Santa Fe Art Institute, Edward Albee Foundation, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. Other honors include a National Science Foundation Innovation Grant and a Sawtelle Innovation Award. He teaches playwriting at St. Edward's University.
Jason Schneiderman
April 4, 2025 at 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icaracus as a Country on Fire and Hold Me Tight. He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers, and his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, and Tin House. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Chaitali Sen
Chaitali Sen is the author of the novel The Pathless Sky (Europa Editions 2015) and the story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books 2023), chosen by Danielle Evans as the winner of the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her stories and essays have been published by American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Catapult, Colorado Review, Ecotone, Electric Literature, LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, Shenandoah, and many other publications. Born in India and raised in New York and Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Austin, Texas.
Amanda Johnston
Amanda Johnston is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has been published in Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, Puerto del Sol, Muzzle, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder of Torch Literary Arts. She is the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. Funded in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Justin Torres
Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, LA Times Image Magazine, and Best American Essays. He lives in Los Angeles, and teaches at UCLA.
Jaymes Sanchez
Jaymes Sanchez is a Texan playwright, actor, director, and educator living in Brooklyn. Sanchez's plays have been developed with The Lark, Broadway Podcast Network/Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Company One, Teatro Vivo, San Diego REP, and Artists' Theatre of Boston. He was an Inaugural Fellow of the Latinx Playwrights Circle Summer Jam in 2023. Sanchez was also the recipient of the 2020 Keene Prize for Literature and the second place prize of Playing on Air's James Stevenson Award. Sanchez has been a finalist for the O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, SPACE on Ryder Farm, the Latinx Theatre Commons Carnaval and the Kitchen Dog Theater New Works Festival, as well as a semifinalist for the Princess Grace Award. MFA: The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
Sasha West
Sasha West is the author of Failure and I Bury the Body and How to Abandon Ship. Her first book won the National Poetry Series, a Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award, and a Bread Loaf Fellowship. Recent poems appear in American Poetry Review, Agni, Georgia Review, and the anthology The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her collaborative multimedia installations with visual artist Hollis Hammonds have been exhibited at the Columbus College of Art and Design Beeler Gallery, the Texas A&M Wright Gallery, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX.
Previous Visiting Writers Series speakers include:
- Kazim Ali
- Eula Biss
- Jericho Brown
- Oscar Caseres
- Cyrus Cassells
- Ana Castillo
- Denise Chavez
- Lucille Clifton
- Natalie Diaz
- Steven Dietz
- Doug Dorst
- Jennifer duBois
- Nathan Englander
- Tarfia Faizullah
- David Wright Faladé
- Carrie Fountain
- Ben Fountain
- Jonathan Safran Foer
- Raul Garza
- Jorie Graham
- Virginia Grise
- Joy Harjo
- Terrance Hayes
- Marie Howe
- A Van Jordan
- Phillip Levine
- Ada Limón
- Karan Mahajan
- Sarah Manguso
- Elizabeth McCracken
- Erika Meitner
- Dinaw Mengestu
- Debra Monroe
- Dinty Moore
- Tomás Q. Morín
- Naomi Shihab Nye
- Emily Pérez
- Emmy Pérez
- Roger Reeves
- Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
- Karen Russell
- Diane Seuss
- ire'ne lara silva
- Gary Soto
- Natalia Sylvester
- Deb Olin Unferth
- Jean Valentine
- Jesús I. Valles
- Derek Walcott
- Monica Wood
- Tiphanie Yanique
- Dean Young
- Jenny Tinghui Zhang