Villanova’s English Department Celebrates 27th Annual Literary Festival with Award-Winning Authors and Poets
Villanova, Pa. – This spring welcomes another year of the highly anticipated Villanova University Literary Festival. This year marks the festival’s 27th iteration, welcoming acclaimed poets and novelists to campus to present readings and meet with students. The featured writers include Rachel Heng, Stephen Sexton, Victoria Chang and Paul Lisicky, who will visit campus during the spring 2025 semester.
The Literary Festival is sponsored by the Department of English, the Creative Writing Program, Gender and Women’s Studies, the Center for Irish Studies, the Writing and Rhetoric Program, and Falvey Library. All events are free and open to the public.
Rachel Heng
Feb. 4 | 7 p.m. | Speakers’ Corner, Falvey Library
Rachel Heng is the author of two novels, most recently The Great Reclamation (Riverhead, 2023), which won the New American Voices Award. The Great Reclamation was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Best Book of 2023 by TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, Amazon Books, Town & Country Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, a Sarah Selects Amazon Book Club pick and an April 2023 Indie Next pick. Her first novel, Suicide Club (Henry Holt / Sceptre, 2018), was a national bestseller in Singapore and has been translated into 10 languages. Heng is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.
Stephen Sexton: 2025 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies
March 13 | 7 p.m. | Presidents’ Lounge, Connelly Center
Stephen Sexton is a Northern Irish poet and lecturer at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of a book of poems, If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019), and the author of a pamphlet of poems, Oils (Emma Press, 2014), which was the Poetry Book Society's Winter Pamphlet Choice of 2014. His work has been published in leading journals in the United Kingdom and Ireland such as Granta, Poetry London and Poetry Ireland Review, as well as several American publications, including POETRY and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Sexton is the 2025 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies.
Victoria Chang
April 8 | 7 p.m. | Speakers’ Corner, Falvey Library
Victoria Chang’s latest book of poems, With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair Books, 2024), received the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry. Her book of poetry, The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press and Corsair Books, 2022), was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The New Yorker and The Guardian. Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021), was named a favorite nonfiction book of 2021 by Electric Literature and Kirkus Reviews. Chang has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She serves as the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and as the director of Poetry@Tech.
Paul Lisicky
April 24 | 7 p.m. | Radnor/St. David's Room, Connelly Center
Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books including Later: My Life at the Edge of the World, one of NPR's Best Books of 2020, and The Narrow Door, a New York Times Editors' Choice and finalist for the Randy Shilts Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed and The New York Times, among other publications. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library. He is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden where he is editor of StoryQuarterly.
About Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Since its founding in 1842, Villanova University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has been the heart of the Villanova learning experience, offering foundational courses for undergraduate students in every college of the University. Serving more than 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students, the College is committed to fortifying them with intellectual rigor, multidisciplinary knowledge, moral courage and a global perspective. The College has more than 40 academic departments and programs across the humanities, social sciences, and natural and physical sciences.