The Third Thursday Literary Series is sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, Department of English, and Southern Humanities Review in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University; the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University; and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Refreshments will be available at 6 PM; the reading will begin at 6:30 PM. Book sales are provided by Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers.
August 27, 2026: Local Readers
Featuring Zanice Bond, Anton Disclafani, and Crystal Rogers
Zanice Bond has made Alabama home for more than a decade and is deeply engaged in the arts and humanities. She serves as Vice President of the Alabama Writers’ Forum and is an associate professor of English at Tuskegee University, where she teaches writing, African American and Southern literature, and linguistics. Dr. Bond earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas and has led and contributed to numerous NEH and humanities-funded projects, including Tuskegee University’s Freshman Common Reading Experience.
Anton DiSclafani is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls and The After Party. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls was an Indie Next selection and finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. Her nonfiction has appeared in Southbound, Rhapsody, and Biographile, and she has written and performed a segment for This American Life. She is Alumni Writer-in-Residence and an Associate Professor at Auburn University.
Crystal Rogers is a Gold Hill, Alabama–based poet whose work explores home, land, and the relationships between people and the natural world. She is a member of the Chewacla Writer’s Guild and Auburn Poets, and co-creator of Kaleidoscope, a poetry–photography collaboration with Janice Sikes. Raised on a family farm in Chambers County, her writing is rooted in lifelong observation of nature and place. She holds a BS and MS from Auburn University and is the owner and operator of Gold Hill Plant Farm, a native-plant nursery.
September 17, 2026: Jennifer Horne
Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2017 to 2021 and was awarded the 2025 Hall-Waters Prize for Excellence in Southern Writing. The author of four collections of poems, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, Borrowed Light, and, most recently, Letters to Little Rock, she also has written a collection of short stories, Tell the World You’re a Wildflower. She is the author of a literary biography, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author, described as “a beguiling tale of madness and literature” by Publisher’s Weekly. She has edited or co-edited five volumes of poetry, essays, and stories, has taught creative writing in a variety of settings, and, since May 2020, has recorded a “Mid-Week Poetry Break,” available on Facebook and YouTube. Her web page, “A Map of the World,” can be found at jenhorne.com.
October 15, 2026: Witness Poetry Prize
Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York featuring A. Van Jordan • Presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 901 South College Street
A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. His latest collection, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, winner of the 2024 Hurston Wright Legacy Award, was released in 2023 (W.W. Norton & Co). Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), a United States Artists Fellowship (2009), and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry (2015). Among his many academic appointments, he most recently served as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Literature at The University of Michigan, before coming to Stanford University, where he currently holds the Humanities and Sciences Chair in English, and where he also serves as part of the inaugural faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies.
November 19, 2026: Sabrina Orah Mark
Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections The Babies and Tsim Tsum. Wild Milk, her first book of fiction, was published by Dorothy, a publishing project. Happily, which began as a monthly column on fairytales and motherhood in The Paris Review, was published by Random House in 2023 and won a Jewish Book Award. She has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and MacDowell. In addition to teaching private workshops she currently teaches nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the Bennington Writing Seminars.
January 21, 2027: Marcus Wicker
Marcus Wicker is the author of three books of poetry: Dear Mothership, Silencer, and Maybe the Saddest Thing, selected by D.A. Powell for the National Poetry Series. His honors include a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Wicker’s poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and POETRY.
February 18, 2027: Ansel Elkins
Ansel Elkins is the author of Blue Yodel, winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Believer, Oxford American, Parnassus, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the American Antiquarian Society, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, as well as a "Discovery"/Boston Review Prize. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at Berea College.
Tuesday, March 23, 2027: Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the essay collection Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024), longlisted for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, served as an Art for Justice Fellow with the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and holds a doctorate in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she lives with her son.
Tuesday, March 30, 2027: Southern Humanities Review Spring Sessions
Featuring Jade Chang and Christopher Kempf
Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and has been published in a dozen countries. Her journalism and essays have recently appeared in The Best American Food Writing, and in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times magazines. She also writes for film and TV. She lives in Los Angeles. What a Time to Be Alive is out in Fall 2026 from Ecco.
Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021) and Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017), as well as of the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2022). Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar.
April 15, 2027: Graduating Student Reading