Villanova’s English Department Welcomes Award-Winning Authors and Poets For 28th Annual Literary Festival

Rick Barot

Jan. 29 | 7:00 p.m. | Falvey Speakers' Corner

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and attended Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), which received the Kathryn A. Morton Prize; Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord (2015), which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and received the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award.

Cauvery Madhavan: 2026 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair of Irish Studies

Feb. 24 | 7:00 p.m. | Presidents’ Lounge, Connelly Center

Cauvery Madhavan was born in India and moved to Ireland 33 years ago, arriving on Valentines Day and, despite the Irish weather, has been in love with the country ever since. Madhavan is the author of three books of fiction–Paddy Indian, The Uncoupling and The Tainted. She writes opinion pieces for the Irish Times and wrote a Saturday column for the Evening Herald for seven years. She has also contributed to the Sunday Tribune, The Phoenix and Travel Extra. She is currently working on her fourth novel. She lives with her husband and three children in County Kildare. Madhavan is also the 2026 Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies. 

Maya C. Popa

March 10 | 7:00 p.m. | Falvey Speakers' Corner

Maya C. Popa, PhD, is the author of Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton 2022; Picador 2023), named one of the Guardian’s Best Books of Poetry. American Faith (Sarabande 2019) was runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was awarded the North American Book Prize in 2020. Dr. Popa’s writing has been commissioned by The United Nations, and her poetry has been featured on a Louis Vuitton trunk for the Visionaries campaign, as well as in the Van Cleef & Arpels Spring Festival. She holds a PhD  from Goldsmiths, University of London, focusing her degree on the role of wonder in poetry. She earned her MSt from Oxford University, her MFA from NYU and her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College.

Álvaro Enrigue and His Literary Translator, Natasha Wimmer 

April 14 | 7:00 p.m. | Falvey Speakers' Corner 

Álvaro Enrigue was a Cullman Center Fellow and a Fellow at the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies. He has taught at New York University, Princeton University, the University of Maryland and Columbia University. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The White Review, n+1, London Review of Books, El País, among others. Muerte súbita (Sudden Death)—his first novel translated into English—was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction, and has been translated into many languages. 

Natasha Wimmer is a translator of contemporary fiction and literary nonfiction from Spanish to English. She spent four formative years in Spain as a child and concentrated in Romance Languages and Literature as an undergraduate at Harvard University. She is a regular visiting lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University, and she has written reviews and criticism for The Believer, The New York Times, and The Nation, among other publications. She is the recipient of an NEA Translation Grant, a PEN Translation Award, and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.