George Mason University’s Creative Writing Program joins Watershed Lit, Fall For the Book, and Mason’s University Libraries in presenting the Fall 2026 Visiting Writers Series.
Writers will meet for afternoon workshops with students from Mason’s MFA program in creative writing and will then offer evening readings and conversations open to the public and hosted by Mason’s creative writing community.
All readings/conversations will be in the Fenwick Library Reading Room, Room #2001 (check below for days and times)
Visit creativewriting.gmu.edu for updated information.
Here is the Fall 2026 Visiting Writers lineup:
NONFICTION: Hester Kaplan
Thursday, September 24
7:30pm Fenwick Reading Room
Hester Kaplan is an award-winning writer of story collections, novels, and the memoir/biography, Twice Born: Finding My Father in the Margins of Biography, published in 2025 and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her story collection, The Edge of Marriage, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and her work has been widely published and anthologized, including in The Best American Short Stories series. She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Awards and was named a Quarry Farm Fellow by the Center for Mark Twain Studies for Twice Born.
FICTION: Shubha Sunder and William Pierce
Wednesday, October 7
6pm Fenwick Reading Room
Presented in Partnership with Fall For the Book
Shubha Sunder is a 2025 Whiting Award winner and the author of Optional Practical Training, an immigrant novel in conversations that won the New American Voices Award and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her first book, Boomtown Girl, a collection of short stories set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She currently teaches in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
William Pierce is editor of AGNI. His short stories have appeared in Granta, Ecotone, American Literary Review, and elsewhere; his story translations in Little Star and New England Review; and his nonfiction in, among other publications, Harvard Review, World Literature Today, and Literary Hub. Pierce is also the author of Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith Press, 2016), a monograph first serialized as a three-part essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has been cited as Notable twice in The Best American Essays and given Special Mention three times in The Pushcart Prize.
POETRY: Fady Joudah
Wednesday, October 7
7:30pm Fenwick Reading Room
Presented in Partnership with Fall For the Book
Fady Joudah is the author of […]. He has also published seven other collections of poems: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; Tethered to Stars; and Exhibit G. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. Winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, he has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.
POETRY: John Yau
Thursday, October 29
7:30pm Fenwick Reading Room
John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, art critic, and publisher of Black Square Editions, who has written across genres and worked in different mediums. Starting in the mid-1980s, he began collaborating with American and European artists, from the widely celebrated to the young and emerging. The collaborations took the form of paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, postcards, objects, clothing, and jazz compositions. Starting in the late 1970s, he began writing reviews and essays for art magazines, galleries, and museums, as well as publishing his poems and fiction. He taught contemporary art history in the art department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University) from 2001 to 2025, when he retired. He has written monographs on many artists, most recently, Liu Xiaodong (2021) and Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal (2022). His most recent book of essays is Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (2024) which received an American book Award (2025), and his most recent book of poetry is Diary of Small Discontents: New & Selected Poems 1974-2024. The recipient of awards and grants for his poetry, fiction, and criticism, he has published more than 20 books of poetry.
NONFICTION: David Streitfeldt
Thursday, November 5
7:30pm Fenwick Reading Room
David Streitfeld is an old newspaper hack. He began his career at The Washington Post, eventually switched to The Los Angeles Times, and has spent the last 19 years at The New York Times. In 2013, he was one of a team of Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. In 2026, he published Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry, a biography inspired by a long friendship with the Texas novelist but supplemented with extensive interviews and archival research. Streitfeld lives in the Bay Area with his family and too many books.