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The festival, held on Saturday, April 11, 2026, is our annual celebration of the literary community and is free and open to the public. Featured writers this year include Nina MacLaughlin, Rajia Hassib, Kate McKean, and our Writer-in-Residence, Julian T. Brolaski. This event curates an intimate space for students and community members to gather and discuss these authors’ works through Q&A and live interviews.

Readers: Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Rajia Hassib, Kate McKean, and Nina MacLaughlin

Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / xe / them) is a poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights, 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). Julian is a 2023 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Its poems were recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). With its band Juan & the Pines, it released an EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s first full-length album It’s Okay Honey came out in August 2023.

Rajia Hassib was born and raised in Egypt and moved to the United States when she was twenty-three. Her first novel, In the Language of Miracles, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and received an honorable mention from the Arab American Book Awards. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Marshall University, and she has written for The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker online. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and two children.

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice (Black Sparrow), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now a books columnist for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kate McKean is both an author and literary agent. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, Catapult, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, Bustle and many more. Her first book, Write Through It: An Insider’s Guide to Publishing and the Creative Life is out now from Simon Element. In 2026, Sourcebooks will publish her debut picture book Pay Attention to Me. As an agent she has been with the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency since 2006, where she’s built a diverse client list including beloved humorist and novelist Daniel M. Lavery, New York Times best-selling YA horror writer Madeleine Roux, and New York Times best-selling fantasy writer Alix E. Harrow.

Sponsored by the Lex Allen Literary Endowment, Department of English and Creative Writing, and the Dee Hull Everist Visiting Speaker Fund

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