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 29, 2024: Local Readers
Ken Autrey is an Emeritus Professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, where he taught poetry, creative nonfiction, and advanced composition. His work has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review, and many other journals. In addition to Penelope in Repose, winner of the 2021 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest (Evening Street Press), he has published three chapbooks: Pilgrims (Main Street Rag), Rope Lesson (Longleaf Press), and The Wake of the Year (Solomon and George).
Ernest L. Gibson III received his PhD in Afro-American studies from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He is the author of Salvific Manhood: James Baldwin’s Novelization of Male Intimacy (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and has published on James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Scandal. An interdisciplinary scholar by training, his research lies at the intersections of literary, cultural, and queer theories, and often pivots on questions of manhood, masculinity, and vulnerability. He is currently at work on his second book project, tentatively entitled, Dark Penmanship: Afro-Ontology, Resistance, and Freedom.
Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, Oksana, Behave! was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in 2019 and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick as well as a best spring read according to Oprah Magazine, InStyle, Pop Sugar, and The Wall Street Journal. Her second novel, Something Unbelievable, was published by Random House in April 2021 and was praised in the New York Times and called a best spring read according to PureWow, AV Club, Paperback Paris, Alma, and Bustle. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and the Fiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review.
September 19, 2024: Catherine Carter and Brian Gastle
Catherine Carter is the author of three full-length collections of poetry–Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, and The Memory of Gills, all with LSU Press–and a chapbook–Marks of the Witch, with Jacar Press. A professor of English at Western Carolina University, Catherine teaches creative writing and English Education. She is also the interim managing editor for Cider Press Review and serves as the Jackson County representative of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
Brian Gastle is Professor of English at Western Carolina University where he teaches medieval literature, professional writing, and research methods. Has served as Department Head, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, and Interim Associate Provost. He is the recipient of WCU’s University Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
October 3, 2024: Witness Poetry Prize
Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York featuring Victoria Chang and Erica Jing. Presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 901 South College Street.
November 21, 2024: Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, Cutlish, and Whale Aria;a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
January 23, 2025: Todd Boss
Todd Boss is an author, installation artist, inventor, librettist, podcaster, and film producer in Minneapolis. His fourth poetry collections from W. W. Norton & Co. is Someday the Plan of a Town (2022). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and NPR. His first children’s book, The Boy Who Said Wow, was released in 2023 from Simon & Schuster’s Beach Lane imprint. His work has been recognized with Grammy nominations, Emmy awards, and by the National Book Foundation. He is the founding Artistic Director of Motionpoems, a production company that has turned more than 150 contemporary poems into short films. His podcast, There’s a Poem in That, launched in 2023. In 2018, he sold all his possessions and circled the globe in a series of 30+ house-sits.
February 5, 2025: Claudia Rankine
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University. Rankine has published several collections of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the PEN Center USA Poetry Award, and the Forward poetry prize; Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004); and Nothing in Nature is Private (1994), which won the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Rankine has coedited American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (2002), American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007), and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (2014). Her poems have been included in the anthologies Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (2003), Best American Poetry (2001), and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry (1996). Her play Detour/South Bronx premiered in 2009 at New York’s Foundry Theater. Rankine has been awarded fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2014 she received a Lannan Literary Award. She has taught at the University of Houston, Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, and Pomona College.
February 20, 2025: Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize. A MacDowell Fellow, her poems have been published in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ok was a finalist for a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms & Features visiting teaching artist, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books in 2022-2023.
March 20, 2025: Southern Humanities Review Spring Sessions
Julia Phillips is the author of the bestselling novels Bear and Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. Julia's work has been translated into twenty-six languages. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She is on the board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center, a nonprofit that helps people heal from violence. She teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Born in Nixburg, Alabama, Rodney Terich Leonard is the author of Sweetgum & Lightning (Four Way Books). His next collection, Another Land of My Body, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Poems in the Afterglow, Poetry Foundation Online, The Southern Review, What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.
April 17, 2025
Readings by Graduating Students
May 15, 2025
Readings by Community Members