Visiting Writer: Shubha Sunder and William Pierce

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 6:00 PM EDT
Fenwick Library, #2001

The Fall 2026 Visiting Writers Series continues with Shubha Sunder, a 2025 Whiting Award winner and the author of Optional Practical Training, and William Pierce, a short story and nonfiction writer who is also the editor of AGNI.

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.