Visiting Writer Reading Series
VISITING WRITER SERIES FALL 2025
A semester featuring an Oprah Book Club Pick author, a host of NPR’s Forum, and several award-winners.
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 Aria Aber, Nicole Chung, R.O. Kwon, Jonathan Escoffery, Cristina Garcia, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, among others.
September 10, 2025
Armen Davoudian
2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge
Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, The Palace of Forty Pillars, was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Davoudian grew up in Ishafan, Iran. The Palace of Forty Pillars tells of a self estranged from the world around him, as a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America. The Armenian genocide, war in the Middle East, the specter of homophobia cast long shadows, as does the distances between mother and son, the power imbalance between lovers, and tense exchanges with the morality police in Iran.
September 24, 2025
Oscar Villalón
2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge
Oscar Villalón is the Editor in Chief of the renowned literary magazine Zyzzyva, a Bay Area staple for 40 years, and winner of a Whiting Award. In conversation with Pulitzer-Prize finalist Ingrid Rojas Contreras, the two will discuss what literature can do in a time of crisis, what is the voice rising out of the West Coast, and what is the future looking like for literary publishing.
October 8, 2025
Sam Sax
2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge
Sam Sax is the author of Yr Dead, a novel longlisted for the National Book Award. Their poetry books have garnered prizes from the National Poetry Series and the Academy of American Poets. Sam Sax is an artist thinking about the figure of the animal, transgression, queerness, faith/Judaism, constructions of gender/masculinity, state violence/surveillance. Their debut novel illuminates the queer and Jewish experiences of a nonbinary person whose life flashes before their eyes as they light themself on fire.
November 12, 2025
Jon Hickey
2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge
Jon Hickey is the author of the novel, Big Chief, which imagines a cutthroat campaign for control of a Native American reservation. Hickey is an enrolled member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians (Anishinaabe). The Washington Post said of this novel, “Hickey is so sure-footed, I’ll follow wherever he goes.” We hope you too will join us.
November 16, 2025
Alexis Madrigal
Off-site: 2:30 - 3:30. The Prelinger Library, in San Francisco
Alexis Madrigal, co-host of KQED’s show Forum, and author of The Pacific Circuit, an incisive exploration of Oakland’s storied past as home to longshoremen, Black Panthers, and the blues, will deliver a community teach-in about the role of the artist in the archive, the untold histories buried in archives, and how archival research transformed his process in writing The Pacific Circuit.
December 3, 2025
Leila Mottley
2:30 - 3:30. Hagerty Lounge
Of the then-nineteen year old author of Nightcrawling, Leila Mottley, Oprah Winfrey said: “This young poet wowed me with her ode and elegy to Oakland, and her acute and insightful depictions of youth, injustice, the legacy of incarceration and the resilience of community and chosen family.” Mottley writes with absolute candor and raw beauty about women’s lives. The Girls Who Grew Big focuses on a group of teenaged mothers, vacillating at the edges of society, rejected by the community at large and finding a haven of community with themselves. Nightcrawling, about a teenager’s serial abuse, was based on a true story involving the Oakland Police.
Visiting Writer Series Video Archive
Our Visiting Writers' readings captured on video.