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Lannan Center Podcast
Hosted by Lannan Center · EN
Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University is a literary, critical, and pedagogical undertaking devoted to the situation of poetry and poetics in the contemporary world. Based in the President’s Office, the Center brings attention to a traditional domain of academic research, but sees poetry as a current practice rather than as a field of historical research. The Center recognizes that “art’s social presence,” in the phrase of Adrienne Rich, is vital to contemporary culture; that poetry, or writing more generally, traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought: it reconfigures these fields according to the designs of imagination. The Lannan Center hosts Readings and Talks throughout the academic year. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
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Volha Hapeyeva and Valzhyna Mort | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks
Apr 701:04:05Tap to summarizeOn April 7th, 2026, the Lannan Center hosted a poetry reading and talk with Volha Hapeyeva and Valzhyna Mort. Hosted by Carolyn Forché.Volha Hapeyeva (b. in Minsk, Belarus) is a poet, writer, translator, doctor of linguistics, and artist. She writes in Belarusian and German and has received numerous prizes and awards for her work: Wortmeldungen Literature Preis-2022 (Germany), among others. Her poems have been translated into more than 15 languages. She is the author of 14 books in Belarusian and the English poetry book In My Garden of Mutants (2021, Arc Publication) was awarded the English PEN Translates Award. She was a 2019/2020 writer-in-residence in Graz, a fellow of the Writers-in-Exile Program of German PEN, and in 2022\2023 was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.Since 2019, she has lived in Austria and Germany.Valzhyna Mort is a poet and translator born in Minsk, Belarus, and she writes in English and Belarusian. She is the author of three poetry collections, Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press 2008), Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2011) and, mostly recently, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), named one of the best poetry book of 2020 by The New York Times and The NPR, and the winner of the 2020 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize. Mort is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Lannan Foundation, and the Amy Clampitt Foundation.Her work has been honored with the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. She teaches at Cornell University.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →2026 Lannan Literary Festival: An Evening with Salman Rushdie
Mar 3101:00:10Tap to summarizeOn March 31, 2026, Acclaimed author Salman Rushdie joined former NPR host and Princeton visiting professor Razia Iqbal for a conversation about his extraordinary writing life, viewed through the lens of change Rushdie will discuss his latest work, The Eleventh Hour, a quintet of short stories published in November 2025, alongside reflections on his literary journey from early novels exploring postcolonial experience to his recent memoir Knife, which chronicles his recovery from the 2022 attack.Salman Rushdie is the author of 22 books, including Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Quichotte, all of which have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize; a collection of stories, East, West; a memoir, Joseph Anton; a work of reportage, The Jaguar Smile; and three collections of essays, including Languages of Truth. His most recent book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction. His many awards include the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, which he won twice; the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award; the National Arts Award; the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature; and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour. In 2007, he was awarded a Knighthood for services to literature and was made a Companion of Honour in 2022. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a commandeur de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a former president of PEN America and the recipient of the PEN Centenary Courage Award. His books have been translated into over forty languages. In 2023, he was awarded the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels and named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →2026 Lannan Literary Festival: An Evening with Travis Chi Wing Lau
Mar 2600:57:02Tap to summarizeOn March 26, 2026, Poet Travis Chi Wing Lau, author of What’s Left Is Tender, joined radio host Georgina Godwin for an intimate conversation about his powerful exploration of disability, chronic pain, and family silence.Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his)is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. He received his B.A. in English with a minor in Classical Civilization from the University of California, Los Angeles (2012). He received both his M.A. (2013) and Ph.D. (2018) in English at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is primarily focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture with research and teaching interests in health humanities, disability studies, and the history of medicine.Travis has contributed to numerous publications dedicated to accessible public scholarship like Synapsis, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lapham’s Quarterly. He also regularly reviews collections of poetry for literary and arts journals like Up the Staircase Quarterly and Tupelo Quarterly.Travis has over a decade of teaching experience. He previously taught at BrainChild Education, a K-12 tutoring center in Oakland, CA. From 2010-2012, he also worked as a peer learning facilitator at UCLA’s Academics in the Commons/Athletics Peer Learning Labs, where he regularly held tutorials on composition and literature. He also served as an Adjunct Instructor in English for the Community College of Philadelphia and graduate student instructor for University of Pennsylvania’s Department of English and The College of Liberal and Professional Studies Program. He was formerly Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in English at The University of Texas at Austin.Beyond teaching, Travis has worked as a Student Educator for the Armand Hammer Museum, where he developed and gave public tours of art exhibitions. In 2010, Travis worked internationally as an intern and guest English instructor at Ryugaku Journal, a Japanese publication catering to Japanese students interested in studying abroad in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.Alongside his academic and public writing, he is also a poet who writes often about embodiment at the intersections of queerness and disability. His poetry has been widely published and nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies. He is also the recipient of the Greater Columbus Art Council’s Artists Elevated Award in literature.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →2026 Lannan Literary Festival: An Evening with Julia Alvarez
Mar 2401:05:32Tap to summarizeOn March 24, 2026, Dominican-American poet, novelist and essayist, Julia Alvarez read from her latest poetry collection in conversation with radio host Georgina Godwin. The poems in Visitations reflect on change across the arc of decades—family, aging, love, the body, finding voice, and the very act of poetry itself.Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work was included in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling. In 2024, she was the subject of an American Masters documentary, “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” on PBS and in Spring 2026, she will publish Visitations, her first new collection of Alvarez’s poems in over twenty years. Alvarez is one of the founders of Border of Lights, a movement to promote peace and collaboration between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She lives in Vermont.
Transcribe →Yuri Herrera | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks
Feb 1100:57:24Tap to summarizeOn Tuesday, February 10, 2026, the Lannan Center hosted a conversation between Mexican novelist Yuri Herrera and Carmen Lamas (Latinx Literary Culture Professor at the University of Virginia).Yuri Herrera is a writer born in Actopan, Hidalgo, México, and he writes in both Spanish and English. His first novel, Trabajos del reino (trans. Kingdom Cons), won the Premio Binacional de Novela Joven 2003 and received the “Otras voces, otros ámbitos” prize for the best novel published in Spain in 2008; his second novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (Signs Preceding the End of the World) was a finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize. His third novel is La transmigración de los cuerpos (Transmigration of Bodies). The three novels have been translated into multiple languages and published in English. In 2016, he shared with translator Lisa Dillman the Best Translated Book Award for the translation of Signs Preceding the End of the World. In 2016, Rice University and Literal Publishing published Talud, a collection of his short stories. The same year, he received the Anna Seghers Prize at the Academy of Arts of Berlin for the body of his work. His latest books are the historical narrative A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, and the sci-fi short stories collection Diez planetas. He received his BA in Political Science at UNAM, MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught literary theory, creative writing, and Latin American literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico and at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte before coming to Tulane University, where he is an Associate Professor.Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →Jenny Offill | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks
Jan 2100:59:35Tap to summarizeOn Tuesday, January 20th, the Lannan Center hosted a reading and discussion by American fiction writer Jenny Offill, hosted by Lannan Visiting Chair Rabih Alameddine. Jenny Offill is an acclaimed American fiction writer whose debut novel, Last Things (1999), was named a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the LA Times First Book Award. The New York Times named her second novel, Dept. of Speculation, one of the 10 Best Books of 2014. Weather: A Novel was published in 2020 and lauded by the Boston Globe as “tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible.” Her critical work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Slate. She is coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of the anthologies Money Changes Everything and The Friend Who Got Away; author of a number of children’s books; and subject of a February 2020 feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How to Write Fiction when the Planet is Falling Apart.” Honors include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Film Academy Fellowship in Fiction, and resident fellowships at Macdowell Colony, the Slovenian PEN Centre, and Yaddo.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Tribute | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks
Nov 1901:03:14Tap to summarizeOn Tuesday, November 18th, the Lannan Center hosted a special tribute evening honoring Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, featuring writers Nukoma wa Ngugi, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, and Helon Habila. Moderated by Lannan Visiting Lecturer Tope Folarin.Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1938–2025) was an award-winning novelist, playwright, and essayist from Kenya whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. Born in 1938, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s early work was written in English under the name of James Ngugi. Novels such as The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), and Petals of Blood (1977) established his reputation as the foremost writer in post-Independence Kenya. In the 1970s, he abandoned English for Gikuyu and Swahili, writing his critical apologia on this subject in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986).Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →Fady Joudah | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks
Oct 2200:57:48Tap to summarizeOn Tuesday, October 21st, the Lannan Center hosted a reading and discussion by Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, hosted by Carolyn Forché.Fady Joudah is the author of […], a 2024 finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also published six 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; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →Rabih Alameddine | 2025-2026 Readings and Talks
Oct 100:56:36Tap to summarizeOn Tuesday, September 30th, the Lannan Center hosted a book launch for Rabih Alameddine's The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother), hosted by Tope Folarin, Lannan Visiting Lecturer.Rabih Alameddine is the Lannan Foundation's Visiting Chair and author of seven critically acclaimed novels, most recently The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (And His Mother), winner of the 2025 National Book Award. He is also author of The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press, 2021), winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize in 2022; The Angel of History (Grove Press, 2016), winner of the Lambda Literary Award 2017; An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); Koolaids (Picador, 1999); and a collection of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Harold Washington Literary Award in 2018, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2019, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University and the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →Roger Reeves | 2024-2025 Readings and Talks
Apr 8, 202500:56:03Tap to summarizeOn Tuesday, April 8th, the Lannan Center hosted a reading by award-winning poet Roger Reeves, hosted by Carolyn Forché.Roger Reeves is the author of Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf, 2023) and Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Tracy K. Smith called it “a revelation and a form of reparation.” His debut collection is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, two Cave Canem Fellowships and a Whiting Award. Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.
Transcribe →