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  • Native American Boarding School Symposium

    This symposium provides a space for generative conversations on what we know about Native American boarding schools and what that knowledge means. Join us in exploring the 20th-century history of North American Indian boarding schools in this two-day symposium, featuring speakers, workshops, and film.

    About the Symposium

    In the late-19th and early-20th century, throughout the United States and Canada, federal governments created boarding schools for Native American youth. Student experiences at each school varied, depending on living conditions, curriculum, and who oversaw the school (churches, federal employees, trained teachers, etc.). The boarding schools tried to strip children of their Indigenous culture, agency, and family. The white administrators forcibly cut children’s hair, sacred to many, and required that they only wear western clothing instead of their traditional clothing. In many schools, students were expected to adhere to strict rules that helped repress the expression of Indigenous culture. In most schools, for example, children could only speak English, a language completely unfamiliar to them. Failure to adhere to rules and complete assigned work could result in severe punishment. The schools subjected the children to inadequate diets, rampant disease, overwork, and overcrowding, which along with the poor building and living conditions resulted in poor health and even death.

    The governments of Canada and the United States left the history of Native American boarding schools unacknowledged until relatively recently. Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, made a formal apology for the implementation of boarding school systems and the trauma they produced in 2008, with President Joe Biden making the United States’ national apology in 2024.

    This symposium brings together scholars who have worked with the history of Native American Boarding Schools in North America. The goal of this symposium is to spark conversation on what is known about Native American boarding schools and what this knowledge means. The Native American Boarding School Symposium will be hosted March 26–27 on Monmouth University’s campus.

    The Native American Boarding School Symposium would not be possible without the generous help of the Diversity Innovation Grant from the Intercultural Center at Monmouth University. We are grateful for this grant and thank all of the co-sponsors of this event: the Office of the Provost, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Education, the Leon Hess Business School, the Department of English, the Department of Criminal Justice, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, the Intercultural Center, the Department of History and Anthropology, and the Program in Gender and Intersectionality Studies.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Visiting Writers Series with Blake Butler

    Blake Butler is the author of twelve book-length works, recently including Molly, Void Corporation, and UXA.GOV. His short fiction, interviews, reviews, and essays have appeared widely, including in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Fence, Bomb, Bookforum, and as an ongoing column at Vice. In 2021, he was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He is a founding editor of HTMLGIANT.

  • Toni Morrison Day 2025

    Keynote Speaker: Autumn Womack

    Autumn Womack is an associate professor of African American studies and English at Princeton University. She is the author of “The Matter of Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930” (U. Chicago, 2022), which won the
    MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. At Princeton University she curated the critically acclaimed archival exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, which brought over 150 never seen original archival objects into view. She is currently at work on two book projects that focus on Morrison: “The Wanderer: Toni Morrison and the Art of Creativity” and “Sites of Memory: Toni Morrison and the Politics of the Archive”.

  • Andrew Martin -Visiting Writer

    The Visiting Writers Series will welcome Andrew Martin, who will be reading from his latest novel, which will be released in 2026.

    He is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book, the story collection Cool for America, and the forthcoming novel Down Time. His work appears regularly in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, and his stories and essays have also been published recently in The Atlantic, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Montana’s MFA program, he teaches in the Writer’s Foundry MFA at St. Joseph’s University and in the Mountainview MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University

    Please RSVP to Michele McBride mmcbride@monmouth.edu to be put on the attendee list.

     

  • Akhil Sharma – Visiting Writer

    Sharma is a highly decorated short-story writer and novelist; he’s been awarded many of the most prestigious prizes and recognitions that a fiction writer can receive. His first novel, An Obedient Father (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), hailed in New York Magazine by Jonathan Franzen as “A great novel” and described by Hilary Mantel in the New York Review of Books as “uncompromising,” with a “first chapter . . . [that] blasts off the locks and splinters the wood,” received the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

    Sharma’s second novel, the spectacular Family Life (Norton, 2014), received both the International Dublin Literary Award and the Folio Prize. Scholar and writer Edmund White called it “a terse, devastating account of growing up as a brilliant outsider in American culture” and described it as “a near perfect novel.”

    Sharma’s third and most recent book, the story collection A Life of Adventure and Delight (Norton, 2017), prompted writer Yiyun Li to describe Sharma as “truly the Chekhov of our time.” His stories have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Award Stories. 

    Indeed, Sharma is such an exacting and rigorous writer that, quite unusually, he recently published a revised and rewritten edition of An Obedient Father (McNally Editions, 2022) more than twenty years after it first appeared in print. The critic Wyatt Mason, reviewing the revised version in The New York Times Magazine, described this as “Something white-rhino rare in the history of literature”, adding, approvingly, “there is scarcely a paragraph that hasn’t been improved . . . ”

    Born in Delhi, India, Sharma grew up in Edison, NJ. Before becoming a professor at Duke, where he now teaches, he was on the faculty at Rutgers. He is an engaging and surprising speaker and an excellent reader of his work

    This event is sponsored by The Visiting Writers Series, with the Center for the Arts and the Intercultural Center.

  • John Vercher

    John’s debut novel, Three-Fifths, was named one of the best books of 2019 by the Chicago Tribune. In the U.K., Three-Fifths was named a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and The Guardian. His second novel, After the Lights Go Out, was published by Soho Press. It’s been called “simply brilliant” by Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “shrewd and explosive” by The New York Times, and was named an Editors’ Choice in Adult Fiction for 2022 by Booklist. His third novel, Devil Is Fine has received starred reviews from Booklist and BookPage, was named a Best New Book of the Summer by TIME Magazine and The Root, an Indie Next pick for July, and one of the Top Ten Books to Add to Your Reading List in June by the Los Angeles Times. Additionally, Devil is Fine was a June book pick by The Center for Fiction, one of the 12 Must-Read Books of June by The Chicago Review of Books, a Book of the Day for July by NPR, and was featured on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute.

  • Poetry Readings with Q&A Featuring Alicia Ostriker & Joan Larkin

    ALICIA OSTRIKER has published 19 collections of poetry, been twice nominated for the National Book Award, and has twice received the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry , The Atlantic , Prairie Schooner, and other journals, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Her most recent collections of poems are Waiting for the Light and The Volcano and After:Selected and New Poems 2002 – 2019 . She was New York State Poet Laureate for 2018 – 2021 and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2015 – 2020.

    JOAN LARKIN is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Blue Hanuman (2014); My Body: New and Selected Poems (2007), which received the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle; Lambda Literary Award winner Cold River (1997); and Housework (1975). With Jaime Manrique, Larkin translated Sor Juana’ s Love Poems, a bilingual edition of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz’ s poetry (1997). Her prose works include I f You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (1998) and Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (1998). Her plays include The AIDS Passion, The Living, and Wiretap.

    This event is being held in conjunction with A Tribute to Jean Valentine – Panel Discussion on October 29 at 2:50 in the Julian Abele Room.

    Hosted By Department of English (Brother Austen Poets-in-the-Classroom Series) in partnership with the Visiting Writers Series. Also cosponsored by PGIS (Program in Gender and Intersectionality Studies) 

  • Hernan Diaz, Trust

    Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack. This month’s novel is Hernan Diaz’s Trust.

    WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
    A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

    Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.

    When you register you will be provided the meeting link to join the conversation.