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  • Visiting Writers Series with Megha Majumdar

    Free & Open to the Public, but registration is required. 

    Please join us for a keynote event: Megha Majumdar

    National Bestseller
    Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
    Finalist for the National Book Award
    Oprah’s Book Club Pick & NYPL/WNYC Get Lit March Book Club

    In conversation with Monmouth University students & book signing. Welcome by Dr. Patrick Leahy, Monmouth University President

    Sponsored by:

    The Office of the President
    The Office of the Provost
    The Department of Political Science and Sociology
    The Freed Endowed Chair in Social Sciences
    The Rechnitz Family/UCI Endowed Chair in Marine & Environmental Law and Policy
    Monmouth University Bookstore

  • Garden State Author Talks: Jack Carr

    Former Navy SEAL sniper and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List, Jack Carr brings his explosive new thriller to Pollak Theatre at Monmouth University for its U.S. launch event.

    Appearing live in conversation, Carr will discuss the making of The Fourth Option, his military career, and the real-world forces shaping his fiction.

    This one-night-only event takes place before the book even reaches stores.
    Secure your seat now. Premium & Standard tickets include a SIGNED copy of the book. Attendees with a signed book (whether included with their ticket or purchased onsite) will have access to meet and take a photo with Jack Carr.

     

     

  • Poetry & Image: Exploring how Image and Language Inspire and Transform One Another in Generative Ways

    Poetry & Image: Exploring how Image and Language Inspire and Transform One Another in Generative Ways
    February 12, 2025
    Hands-on Workshop: 11:40 AM – 2:35 PM, DiMattio Gallery
    Poetry Reading: 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM, Great Hall Auditorium

    Two visiting poets, Andrea Ballou and Mike McCarthy, will give a reading and lead a workshop that explores how poetry and image making can inspire, dialog, and transform the other in the creative process. Associate Professor Kimberly Callas collaborated with McCarthy on his recent poetry book Behold and will join the discussion and workshop.
     
    Andrea Ballou is the author of Other Times, Midnight, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize (Persea Books, 2025). A Pushcart Prize nominee, Andrea has received fellowships and residencies from Civitella Ranieri, the National Resource Council, the Tinker Foundation, and others. She earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in Romance Languages & Literatures and her MFA from Lesley University. Currently she is the Director of the Poetry Lab for Elders at the VNA in Somerville, where she has taught poetry and creative writing since 2018. She divides her time between Massachusetts and mid-coast Maine.  https://andreaballou.com/
     
    Michael McCarthy is a national bestselling author whose nonfiction books include The Hidden Hindenburg, Ashes Under Water and The Sun Farmer. His latest book, a poetry collection titled Behold, was published in late 2024. His poems have appeared previously in Poetry East and The Southern Review. https://www.mccarthywriter.com/
     
    This is a con-sponsored event with partners Poetry in the Classrooms and Monmouth Review.

  • Artist Talk: Jake Yuzna

    Jake Yuzna (Filmmaker and Monmouth University Assistant Professor)
    Artist Talk
    March 11, 2026, 4:30pm – 5:30pm
    Pozycki Hall, Lecture Hall 115

    Join us as we welcome the Department of Communication’s newest faculty member to campus, Assistant Professor Jake Yuzna, who will share an artist talk and selects from their creative practice. Yuzna is a filmmaker, artist, and curator whose work often explores evolving identities, subculture, and genre. Their films have been presented at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, London Film Festival, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center, and the British Film Institute, among others. In addition, their work has been distributed by NetFlix, Hulu, PBS, and Arté Television, among others. Yuzna is the first American feature director to win the Teddy Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival and has received additional grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital Foundation, Frameline Foundation, McKnight Foundation, IFP MN, FilmNorth, as well as a Richard P. Rogers Spirit of Excellence Award in Directing from the American Film Institute. Yuzna has also curated projects and exhibitions for the Walker Art Center, Performa: The NYC Biennial of Performance Art, the Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, the City of Los Angeles, and SCCA-Center for Contemporary Art–Ljubljana. Their scholarship has been collected by Yale and New York Universities and they have been a contributor to Artforum Magazine since 2020.
     
    If you have any questions, feel free to contact ArtNOW’s chair, Prof. Dickie Cox.

  • Visiting Writers Series with Joseph Earl Thomas

    Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2023), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Penguin Random House, 2027). His prose and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The Verge, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, The Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his  PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College as well as low residency MFA programs at Holy Family and Randolph Colleges, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

     
    Of his debut novel, the New York Times Books Review stated: “Like the work of Jackson Pollock, the novel reveals itself the longer one spends time with it. Keep looking, the chaos will start to show its pattern, its rhythm, its dimension and its awe-inspiring color,” while NPR said: “It’s hard to list all the themes Thomas tackles with aplomb in this book – just know it’s smart, fast moving and funny as hell.”
     
     
    Copies of Dr. Thomas’s books will be for sale at the event. In addition, he’ll lead a craft discussion in my fiction seminar from 3-4pm in the Student Center, Room 202C. If you’d like to attend, let me know ASAP as space is limited. 
     

    If you plan to attend the reading, please RSVP to Michele McBride, mmcbride@monmouth.edu.

  • Leviathan

    The Institute for Global Understanding (IGU) and the Center for the Arts at Monmouth University invite you to the second Pearson’s World Cinema Series (PWCS) movie and discussion event of the fall semester on Thursday, October 23rd, at 6:05 PM in the Young Auditorium, Bey Hall. We will screen the movie Leviathan (2014) directed by Andrei Zviagintsev. The movie will be hosted by Dr. Jason Adolf with Prof. Tom Pearson. Screening will be followed by a discussion and refreshments.

  • Creative Writing (Advanced)

    Class Schedule: February 12, 17, and 19 | 7:30 – 9:00 PM

    Creative Writing: Character Development (Advanced)

    Whether you are embarking on your memoir or crafting your first work of fiction, the task of the writer is to develop compelling characters that connect with readers. Taking the “me out of memoir” allows you to develop your parents and loved ones as characters. In this three part course, we will utilize description, dialogue, and action to create characters that resonate with readers of any genre. No experience necessary, just a willingness to create characters to jump off the page!

    Zoom Link will be provided upon registration.

  • Creative Writing (Introduction)

    Class Schedule: September 25, 30, and October 7 | 7:30 – 9:00 PM

    Introduction to Creative Writing: Character Development: Whether you are embarking on your memoir or crafting your first work of fiction, the task of the writer is to develop compelling characters that connect with readers. Taking the “me out of memoir” allows you to develop your parents and loved ones as characters. In this three part course, we will utilize description, dialogue, and action to create characters that resonate with readers of any genre. No experience necessary, just a willingness to create characters to jump off the page!

    Zoom Link will be provided upon registration.

  • Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion! This week’s book is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

    Hilary Mantel was the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Wolf Hall Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She also wrote A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O’Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession, and a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost. Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.

    England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

  • John Irving, The World According to Garp

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion! This weeks book is The World According to Gary by John Irving

    New York Times bestseller — 20th anniversary edition with a new afterword from the author — “A wonderful novel, full of energy and art, at once funny and horrifying and heartbreaking.”- The Washington Post

    This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields–a feminist leader ahead of her times.  This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes–even of sexual assassinations.  It is a novel rich with “lunacy and sorrow”; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust.  In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries– with more than ten million copies in print–this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: “In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”

    Praise for The World According to Garp

    “John Irving, it is abundantly clear, is a true artist.” – Los Angeles Times

    “A brilliant panoply of current attitudes toward sex, marriage and parenthood, the feminist movement and – above all – the concept of delineated sexual roles… Irving’s characters will stay alive for years to come.” – Chicago Tribune

    “A social tragi-comedy of such velocity that it reads rather like a domestic sequel to Catch-22.” – The Observer (London)

    “A large talent announces itself on practically every page.” – The Book-of-the-Month Club News