24th Annual Villanova University Literary Festival Features Pulitzer Prize Winner Jericho Brown

Villanova, Pa. – For the 24th consecutive year, the Villanova University Literary Festival is bringing prize-winning poets, novelists and playwrights to campus. This year, the college will welcome accomplished authors from Ireland, the Virgin Islands, and the United States. The semester-long event begins January 27 with Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award winner Jericho Brown.

The Literary Festival is sponsored by the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Every year, prominent writers present lectures and readings to the Villanova community, followed by a reception and book signing. All events start at 7 p.m. and are free and open to the public. All speakers, with the exception of Emma Dabiri, will also be livestreamed.

January 27: Jericho Brown

7 PM, Falvey Library Speakers’ Corner

Livestream the event here.

Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

March 15: Emma Dabiri

7 PM, Presidents’ Lounge, Connelly Center

Emma Dabiri, Villanova University’s 2022 Charles A. Heimbold Jr. Chair in Irish Studies, is an Irish writer, academic, BBC broadcaster, and social media influencer who has written two very successful non-fiction books: Twisted (Harper Perennial, 2020) (published as Don't Touch My Hair in Ireland) and What White People Can Do Next (Harper Perennial, 2021). Her work in the arts, fashion, and the media are complemented by her academic teaching and research in African Studies and Visual Sociology. She is currently completing her doctorate at Goldsmiths University, London.

March 29: Camille Dungy

7 PM, Falvey Library Speakers’ Corner

Livestream the event here.

Camille T. Dungy’s debut collection of personal essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers (W. W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.

April 21:  Tiphanie Yanique

7 PM, Falvey Library Speakers’ Corner

Livestream the event here.

Tiphanie Yanique is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Wife (Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2015), which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection.

Tiphanie is also the author of the novel,  Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014.  Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead Books, 2015) was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

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 cultivated knowledge, understanding and intellectual courage for a purposeful life in a challenging and changing world. With more than 40 majors across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, it is the oldest and largest of Villanova’s colleges, serving more than 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students each year. The College is committed to a teacher-scholar model, offering outstanding undergraduate and graduate research opportunities and a rigorous core curriculum that prepares students to become critical thinkers, strong communicators, and ethical leaders with a truly global perspective.