The Third Thursday Poetry Series & Other Literary Events are 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 28, 2025: Local Readers
Justin Gardiner is the author of three books—the long-form lyric essay Small Altars, winner of a Faulkner-Wisdom Nonfiction Book Award and published by Tupelo Press in 2024; Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Antarctic, published as part of the Crux Literary Nonfiction Series by the University of Georgia Press; and the poetry collection Naming the Lifeboat from Main Street Rag. In 2012-2013, Justin served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Fellow, living for a year at an off-grid homestead in the middle of the Rogue River Wilderness. He is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, where he was awarded both the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend and the Joan Beebe Teaching Fellowship. His essays and poems have appeared in journals that include The Missouri Review, Blackbird, Quarterly West, Zone 3, and Catamaran. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and serves as the Nonfiction Editor of The Southern Humanities Review. His current writing project, By the Light You Find, is a collection of nature essays set in different National Parks and Wilderness Areas.
Steve Harrison holds degrees in mathematics and literature and has taught numerous OLLI at Auburn courses, including those on poets and Jung's psychological theories.
Ash Parsons is a graduate of Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Clown College as well as other, more traditional schools. She is a PEN America Literary Award Winner for the Phyllis Naylor Fellowship, and a Literary Arts Fellow for the Alabama State Council of the Arts. She previously taught English to middle and high school students, as well as teaching creative writing through Troy University’s ACCESS program and Media Studies at Auburn University. Ash has spent some time stumbling around as a zombie on The Walking Dead and lives in Alabama with her family.
September 18, 2025: Jacqueline Allen Trimble
Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow (2017, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, and Poet Lore and has also been featured by the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day twice, Poetry Daily, and Poem-a Day and in the anthologies This is The Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Little Brown, 2024), All Night, All Day: Life, Death and Angels, (Madville Publishing), The Beautiful: Poet’s Reimagine a Nation (Galaula Arts), The Night’s Magician (Negative Capability Press). She has also written episodes for Die Testament and Die Testament 2, South African soap operas. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, her debut poetry collection won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. How to Survive the Apocalypse her second poetry collection was listed as one of the top ten best poetry books of 2022 by New York Public Library. Trimble earned the B.A. from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama. She is Professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.
October 23, 2025: Witness Poetry Prize
Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York featuring Nicole Sealey. Presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 901 South College Street.
November 20, 2025: Joe Wilkins
Joe Wilkins was born and raised on the Big Dry of eastern Montana and now lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. He is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which have garnered wide critical acclaim. Wilkins is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, winner of a GLCA New Writers Award, and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. You can find him online at joewilkins.org.
January 22, 2026: Keetje Kuipers
Keetje Kuipers is the author of four collections of poetry, all from BOA Editions: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award; All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, and Poetry, among others. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships, including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, on the land of the Salish and Kalispel peoples and directly at the foot of the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. She lives there with her wife and their two children, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.
February 19, 2026: Cecily Parks
Cecily Parks received a BA from Rice University in 1999, an MA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 2000, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University in 2005, and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2011. Parks is the author of three poetry collections: The Seeds (Alice James Books, 2025); O’Nights (Alice James Books, 2015); and Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2008). Her chapbook Cold Work (Poetry Society of America, 2005) was chosen by Li-Young Lee for the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2016). Parks teaches at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.
March 19, 2026: Southern Humanities Review Spring Sessions
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels The Au Pair (forthcoming spring 2026), The Winner, The Great Man Theory, Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney’s and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He has developed films and series from his novels with Columbia Pictures, HBO, MGM Television, and others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their children.
Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Danusha is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was honored by the 2020 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem Small Kindnesses has been translated to multiple languages, quoted in O Magazine, turned into a short film, and was recently read by actress Helena Bonham Carter. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the 2021 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her third and newest collection, Blade by Blade (2024) is now available through Copper Canyon Press. Danusha is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program.
April 16, 2026
Readings by Graduating Students
May 21, 2026
Readings by Community Members