Visiting Writer Reading Series

VISITING WRITER SERIES SPRING 2026

A semester featuring the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University, a Lambda Award winner, and a PEN award winner. 

Every semester, the Saint Mary's Creative Writing Department brings distinguished poets, fiction, and nonfiction writers to campus to deliver readings, lectures, and conversations. The Visiting Writing Series is a meeting place, where the most forward-thinking minds in the Bay Area share their work and inklings into their artist process and work. Since the SMC MFA program’s founding in 1995, the series has welcomed writers from across the globe to share their art and insights here on campus. Recent visitors include Sam Sax, Aria Aber, Leila Mottley, Alexis Madrigal, Jonathan Escoffery, Cristina Garcia, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, among others.  

February 11, 2026

Tomas Moniz 

2:30 - 3:30. LeFevre Theater

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Tomas Moniz is the author of novel, All Friends Are Necessary, winner of the 2024 Golden Poppy Award. The story is about a 30-something Latinx bisexual man who is putting his life back together after his first baby is stillborn and his marriage falls apart. Publishers Weekly calls it bighearted, thoughtful, a novel that  “demonstrates the reparative power of friendship, and how it can even transcend the bonds of love.” 

February 25, 2026

R.O. Kwon

2:30 - 3:30. LeFevre Theater

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2026 Saint Mary’s Visiting Writer R.O. Kwon is the recipient of the Lambda Literary Duggins Prize. Her latest novel, Exhibit, was a national bestseller. Exhibit is a novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life. The New York Times hailed it as a “highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors, that adds to the literature on a proclivity much discussed and often misunderstood. It lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise.”

March 18, 2026

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

2:30 - 3:30. Lafayette Room

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Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of the poetry collection, Mothersalt, which draws from the sticky, milk-drenched reality of childbirth and pregnancy. The Washington Post praised this collection’s “wit, heard, and bracing candor.” In an interview, Malhotra stated her poems are interested in “time as assemblage, as something material that accumulates like dust or castoff socks in a family home” and also veer toward the openness of time beyond time, toward the eternal.

March 25, 2026

Aracelis Girmay

2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge

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Aracelis Girmay’s latest poetry collection, Green of All Heads, examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. Aracelis Girmay is a Whiting Award winner, a finalist for the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University. 

April 8, 2026

Carvell Wallace

2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge

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2026 Saint Mary’s Visiting Writer Carvell Wallace is the author of Another Word For Love, which was a Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction and a winner of the PEN Oakland prize. Kiese Laymon called this book “one of the most soulfully crafted memoirs I’ve ever read.” This memoir excavates layers of Wallace’s own history—making sense of seeking refuge from homelessness, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.

April 29, 2026

Maw Shein Win

2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge

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Maw Shein Win is the author of the poetry collection Percussing the Thinking Jar, which unfolds in dreamlike lines and is accompanied by ink drawings, reflecting on the experiences of living in an aging body, and was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award. Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet. She served as the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California and her past collections have been longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and the Golden Poppy Award.