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Fall 2026 Events
UNT's Visiting Writers Series presents Cecily Parks
Please join us for the latest installment of UNT's Visiting Writers Series, featuring the 2026 winner of the UNT Rilke Prize: Cecily Parks.
DAY 1 - Q&A/Reception:
When: Wednesday, November 4, 2026 @ 6:30pm
Where: University Union Rm 339
When: Wednesday, November 4, 2026 @ 6:30pm
Where: University Union Rm 339
DAY 2 - Reading/Book Signing:
When: Thursday, November 5, 2026 @ 8:00pm
Where: University Union Rm 382
When: Thursday, November 5, 2026 @ 8:00pm
Where: University Union Rm 382
Cecily Parks is the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds (Alice James Books, 2025), winner of the UNT Rilke Prize, the Women Writing the West 2026 WILLA Award in Poetry, and the 2025 Writers' League of Texas Book Award in Poetry. This collection was also a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award and named one of NPR's Books We Love. Her previous collections are O'Nights (Alice James Books, 2015), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award, and Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008), finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award and the Shenandoah / Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. She is the guest editor of Best New Poets 2025 (University of Virginia Press, 2025) and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Individual poems of hers have won the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award and the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Nation, The New Republic, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. A faculty member of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University, Parks is currently a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin.
Copies of Parks's poetry collection, The Seeds, will be available for sale and signing, courtesy of UNT Barnes & Noble.
Previous Speakers
For links to listen to previous visiting writers, click here.
Mark Haber
Spring 2026
Mark Haber’s first collection of short stories, Deathbed Conversions (Summerfolk 2008), was translated into Spanish as a bilingual edition as Melville’s Beard (Editorial Argonáutica 2017). His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, was published by Coffee House Press in 2019 and later nominated for the PEN/Hemingway
Award for Debut Novel. His second and third novels, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss and Lesser Ruins (Coffee House), were named a best book of 2022 and 2024 by the New York Public Library
and Literary Hub. Mark’s work has also been recognized by Publishers Weekly, Texas Observer, and the New York Times Book Review. Mark’s fiction has appeared in Guernica, the Southwest Review, and Air/Light, among others.
Julie Otsuka
Spring 2025
Julie Otsuka is an award-winning novelist born in Palo Alto, California. After studying art as
an undergraduate at Yale, she received an MFA in writing from Columbia University
in 1999 and soon adapted her Master’s thesis into the first two chapters of her critically-acclaimed
debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf, 2002). Drawing on research, family history, and personal experience to paint
a portrait of Japanese American incarceration camps during the Second World War, Emperor has since been assigned to incoming freshmen at more than sixty colleges and universities.
Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf, 2011), was named winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, the Albatros Literaturpreis, the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was also selected as Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Top Ten Book by Library Journal and Vogue. Her latest novel, The Swimmers (Knopf, 2022), won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Gregor Von Rezzori Award. Otsuka’s other honors include receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
www.julieotsuka.com/
Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf, 2011), was named winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, the Albatros Literaturpreis, the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was also selected as Best Book of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Top Ten Book by Library Journal and Vogue. Her latest novel, The Swimmers (Knopf, 2022), won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the Gregor Von Rezzori Award. Otsuka’s other honors include receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
www.julieotsuka.com/
Sidney Thompson
Spring 2025
Dr. Sidney Thompson is the author of the award-winning trilogy of historical novels
about Bass Reeves, a legendary African-American lawman of the Old West. The first
book of this trilogy, Follow the Angels, Follow the Doves (Bison Books, 2020), received the 2021 International Afro-American Historical and
Genealogical Society Book Award for Historical Fiction, the Will Rogers Medallion
Award for Western Fiction, the Oklahoma Book Award for Fiction, the Spur Award for
Best Western Novel, the Peacemaker Award for Best First Western Novel, and was named
a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Historical Fiction. The second
book of the series, Hell on the Border (Bison Books, 2021), was named a finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award
Winner for Western Fiction and was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Award for Historical
Fiction. Both are currently being adapted for the Paramount+ miniseries Lawmen: Bass Reeves. The third and final book, titled The Forsaken and the Dead (Bison Books, 2023), was named the National Indie Excellence Award Winner for Western
Fiction and was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Award for Historical Fiction.
His other works include a collection of poetry, titled You/Wee: Poems from a Father (Prolific Press, 2018); Sideshow: Stories (River City, 2006), winner of Foreword INDIES Silver Award for Short Story Collection of the Year; and Kudzu's Enormous New Life (Atmosphere Press, 2022), a middle-grade novel about the unlikely friendship that develops on a Mississippi farm between a precocious chipmunk, a stray German shepherd, and a three-year-old boy on the autism spectrum.
Dr. Thompson currently works out of Texas Christian University, serving as Writing Consultant for the William L. Adams Center for Writing, as well as a professor of composition and creative writing for the English Department and African-American literature for the Master of Liberal Arts program. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University and a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of North Texas.
His other works include a collection of poetry, titled You/Wee: Poems from a Father (Prolific Press, 2018); Sideshow: Stories (River City, 2006), winner of Foreword INDIES Silver Award for Short Story Collection of the Year; and Kudzu's Enormous New Life (Atmosphere Press, 2022), a middle-grade novel about the unlikely friendship that develops on a Mississippi farm between a precocious chipmunk, a stray German shepherd, and a three-year-old boy on the autism spectrum.
Dr. Thompson currently works out of Texas Christian University, serving as Writing Consultant for the William L. Adams Center for Writing, as well as a professor of composition and creative writing for the English Department and African-American literature for the Master of Liberal Arts program. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University and a Ph.D. in American literature from the University of North Texas.
Andrew Boryga
Spring 2024
Andrew Boryga began his career writing for a local newspaper in the Bronx at age 16. Two years
later, he had worked his way into an internship with The New York Times. Since then, his nonfiction work has appeared frequently in the Times, as well as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Daily Beast, and many other outlets. Now, his debut novel, titled Victim, is being released by Penguin Random House. Find a snippet of it here: https://lithub.com/victim/.
"A thrilling work that requires a sense of openness and surrender, not only does [Victim] place the onus on us to decide whether Javi is a victim, a victimizer or both, it also forces us to interrogate our own complicity in the commodification of being a casualty." - New York Times
"A pointed satire of the culture of victimhood… Boryga's experiences as a journalist making a name for himself just as society was grappling with diversity inform this razor-sharp satire of the ways race and class can be exploited." - Washington Post
"A thrilling work that requires a sense of openness and surrender, not only does [Victim] place the onus on us to decide whether Javi is a victim, a victimizer or both, it also forces us to interrogate our own complicity in the commodification of being a casualty." - New York Times
"A pointed satire of the culture of victimhood… Boryga's experiences as a journalist making a name for himself just as society was grappling with diversity inform this razor-sharp satire of the ways race and class can be exploited." - Washington Post
Matt Morton
Spring 2024
UNT Alumni Reading Series
Matt Morton is the author of Improvisation Without Accompaniment, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith (BOA Editions,
2020), and the chapbook What Passes Here for Mountains (Carnegie Mellon, 2022). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Fulbright Program, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee
Writers' Conference. He holds a BA from the University of Texas at Austin, an MFA
from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and a PhD in English from the
University of North Texas. He serves as associate editor for 32 Poems and teaches high school English and creative writing in Missoula, Montana.
Website: mattmortonpoetry.com
Website: mattmortonpoetry.com
Jessica Murray
Spring 2024
UNT Alumni Reading Series
Jessica Murray is the author of the poetry collection Breakfast in Fur (Galileo Press, 2022). Her poems, essays, reviews, and one poetry manifesto appear
in the Birmingham Review, The Boiler, Cherry Tree, Cortland Review, Free State Review, Hapden-Sydney Review, Memorious, Painted Bride Quarterly, and other journals. She has an MFA from University of Florida and a doctorate from
University of North Texas and lives in Austin, Texas.
Website: murrayjessica.com
Website: murrayjessica.com
James Marcus
Spring 2020
Conversation / Q&A about creative writers breaking into top magazines
James Marcus was the editor of Harper's Magazine. His personal essays and other work have appeared in The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The American Scholar, VQR, The Guardian, and The Nation. He is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut and seven translations from the Italian, including Giacomo Casanova's The Duel.
David Keplinger
Spring 2019
UNT Rilke Prize Winner - "Another City"
David Keplinger is a poet and translator. His collections of poems include The Most Natural Thing, The Prayers of Others, The Clearing, The Rose Inside and, most recently, Another City. His translations include Carsten René Nielsen's World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors
and House Inspections, a Lannan Translations Selection; his most recent translation
is Jan Wagner's The Art of Topiary. Keplinger's work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, and The Writer's Almanac, and has been translated and included in anthologies in China, Germany, Denmark,
Northern Ireland, and elsewhere. The recipient of two fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, Keplinger has received support from the Soros Foundation,
the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the D.C. Council on Arts and Humanities, and
the Danish Council on the Arts. He has also received the T.S. Eliot Award, the Colorado
Book Award, the Cavafy Prize from Poetry International and The Erksine Poetry Prize
from Smartish Place. Keplinger teaches in the MFA Program at American University in Washington, DC.
Marilynne Robinson
Spring 2019
Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by
President Barack Obama, for "her grace and intelligence in writing." She is the author
of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle
Award, Home, winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Lila, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Robinson's nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Absence of Mind, The Death
of Adam, and Mother Country, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She teaches at the University of
Iowa Writers' Workshop and lives in Iowa City.
Ada Limón
Fall 2019
Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of
the top 5 poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts
Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves
on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and
the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also
works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.
Laird Hunt
Fall 2019
A former United Nations press officer and current Professor of Literary Arts at Brown
University, Laird Hunt is the author of 8 novels, a collection of stories and two
book-length translations from the French. Kind One was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Anisfield-Wolf
Award for Fiction, and Neverhome won the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine and Italy's Bridge Prize and was shortlisted
for the Prix Femina Étranger. His reviews and essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Los Angeles Times, and his fiction has appeared in many literary journals here and abroad.
Ruth Ellen Kocher
Spring 2018
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of seven books of poetry, including Third Voice (Tupleo Press, 2016), Ending in Planes, winner of the Noemi Poetry Prize, Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2014) and domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press 2013). Her poems have been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary
magazine, She'r, and have appeared in various anthologies including: Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, Black
Nature, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate,
Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden
of Forking Paths. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,
Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is currently an Associate Dean for the College of Arts
and Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she teaches Poetry, Poetics,
and Literature in the undergraduate and MFA writing programs. http://www.ruthellenkocher.org/
Paul Beatty
Spring 2018
Paul Beatty is the author of novels, Tuff, Slumberland, and The White Boy Shuffle, and two poetry collections Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. He was the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. Paul grew up in California and moved to the East Coast for his higher education.
Paul has an MFA in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an MA in psychology
from Boston University. In 1990, he was the first person crowned as Grand Poetry Slam
Champion of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which led to his first book deal. Paul has performed
poetry on MTV and PBS. Paul is the recipient of the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his
most recent novel, The Sellout. The Sellout is also the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and
was named one of the best books of 2015 by The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal. He currently lives in New York City. https://us.macmillan.com/author/paulbeatty.
Paul Beatty wins the Man Booker Prize: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/business/media/paul-beatty-wins-man-booker-prize-with-the-sellout.html?_r=0
Paul Beatty wins the Man Booker Prize: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/business/media/paul-beatty-wins-man-booker-prize-with-the-sellout.html?_r=0
Allison Benis White
Spring 2018
UNT Rilke Prize Winner - "Please Bury Me in This"
Allison Benis White's Please Bury Me in This, published by Four Way Books, has won the 2018 UNT Rilke Prize. The $10,000 prize recognizes a book written by a
mid-career poet and published in the preceding year that demonstrates exceptional
artistry and vision. A Q&A and reception for White will be held on Wednesday, April
11, at UNT on the Square and a campus reading will take place on Thursday, April 12,
2018.
Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me In This and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poets and Writers magazine. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. http://www.allisonbeniswhite.com/
Click here for a feature on KERA's Art & Seek about Allison Benis White and the UNT Rilke Prize.
Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me In This and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poets and Writers magazine. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. http://www.allisonbeniswhite.com/
Click here for a feature on KERA's Art & Seek about Allison Benis White and the UNT Rilke Prize.
Eduard Corral
Fall 2018
Eduardo C. Corral's first book, Slow Lightning, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2011. His poems have appeared
in Ambit, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Poetry Magazine. He's the recipient of residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He's also
the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
and a Hodder Fellowship and the National Holmes Poetry Prize, both from Princeton
University. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State
University.
Colin Barrett
Fall 2018
Colin Barrett's first collection of stories, Young Skins, was originally published by Stinging Fly Press in 2013. It won the 2014 Frank O'Conner
International Short Story Prize, The Guardian First Book Award and the Rooney Prize
for Irish Literature. Colin was one of the 5 under 35 honorees for The National Book
Foundation in the United States in 2015. Young Skins has been translated into 8 languages so far and one of the stories, Calm With Horses,
is being made into a feature film produced by DNC films, Film4 and Element Pictures.
Colin's short stories and nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, A Public Space, the New Statesman, The Guardian and other magazines and journals. In 2018 he was selected as one of 4 protégés for
the Rolex Arts Initiative.
Lucas Mann
Fall 2018
Lucas Mann is the author of Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, which earned a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. His essays and
stories have appeared in Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, Wigleaf, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He has received fellowships from United States Artists and The National
Endowment for the Arts. He teaches writing at The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth,
and lives in Providence, RI.
Jaquira Diaz
Fall 2017
Jaquira Díaz is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, an
NEA fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts, and fellowships from the Wisconsin
Institute for Creative Writing, The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Best American Essays 2016, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Kenyon Review, The Sun, Brevity, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She teaches at Kenyon College, where she is the 2016-18
Kenyon Review Fellow in prose. http://www.jaquiradiaz.com/
Padma Viswanathan
Fall 2017
Padma Viswanathan's debut novel, The Toss of a Lemon, was published in eight countries, a bestseller in three, and a finalist for the
Commonwealth (Regional) First Book Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Prize, and the
Pen Center USA Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, has been publish in Canada, the USA, India, and Australia. In Canada, it was shortlisted
for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a national bestseller.
Viswanathan's short fiction appears in various journals; her story "Transitory Cities" won the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Her plays include House of Sacred Cows and Disco Does Not Suck. She has published cultural journalism and reviews in such venues as Elle Canada, The National Post, The Rumpus, and Guernica. Her handwritten Letter-in-the-Mail for The Rumpus can be found in Best American Non-Required Reading 2012. She has also published several short translations of Brazilian fiction.
Viswanathan teaches fiction-writing and literature in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville. She has served on juries for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Neustadt Prize, and others. http://padmaviswanathan.com/
Viswanathan's short fiction appears in various journals; her story "Transitory Cities" won the 2006 Boston Review Short Story Contest. Her plays include House of Sacred Cows and Disco Does Not Suck. She has published cultural journalism and reviews in such venues as Elle Canada, The National Post, The Rumpus, and Guernica. Her handwritten Letter-in-the-Mail for The Rumpus can be found in Best American Non-Required Reading 2012. She has also published several short translations of Brazilian fiction.
Viswanathan teaches fiction-writing and literature in the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville. She has served on juries for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Neustadt Prize, and others. http://padmaviswanathan.com/