Literary Arts Live
Literary Arts Live celebrates the diverse vitalities of contemporary literature.
Bates has a long tradition of welcoming poets and authors to read from their work. In 1932 William Butler Yeats read from his poetry in the Chapel. From the 50s through the 80s, Bates professor-poet John Tagliabue brought many distinguished writers to campus, including Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks. First established as Language Arts Live in 1991 by senior lecturer emeritus Robert Farnsworth, the series has now hosted readings, class visits, and residencies by over 100 authors, among them Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, and Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Ford, Tyehimba Jess, Donald Justice, Yusef Komunyakaa, Paul Muldoon, Richard Russo, Tracy K. Smith, Elizabeth Strout, and Colson Whitehead. Recent Bates alums have also returned to read from their prize-winning books: Jessica Anthony, Christian Barter, Christina Chiu, Gabriel Fried, and Craig Teicher.
Literary Arts Live events are made possible from the generous support of the English Department, the John Tagliabue Fund, and the Learning Associates Fund. All events are wheelchair accessible, open to the public, and free of charge. For questions about our series, please contact Hannah Underwood at hunderwood@bates.edu.
For more on the Arts at Bates, visit this page.
Upcoming Reading
Omar El Akkad
Thursday 09/10 @7pm
Muskie Archives 201
National Book Award-winning author and reporter Omar El Akkad was born in Egypt, and was raised in Qatar before moving to Canada with his family. His reporting includes dispatches from the war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantànamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. El Akkad is a recipient of Canada’s National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists. His debut novel, American War (Vintage 2017), won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. His second novel, What Strange Paradise (Knopf 2021), won the Giller Prize for Canadian fiction. El Akkad’s first full-length work of creative nonfiction, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, won the 2025 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
For more information, contact Prof. Myronn Hardy at mhardy@bates.edu.
Deb Olin Unferth
Monday, 09/28 @7pm
Muskie Archives 201
Born and raised in Chicago, Deb Olin Unferth has published six books of fiction, including Barn 8 (Graywolf 2020) and Earth 7 (Graywolf 2026), a climate science fiction novel written in part while sailing the arctic circle.
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, Tin House, NOON, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. Her work has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and the Creative Capital grant for literature. When Unferth last visited Literary Arts Live, she had just been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Holt 2011), about dropping out of college to join the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Unferth is now
an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project.For more information, contact Professor Jess Anthony at janthony@bates.edu.
Dur e Aziz Amna
Wednesday, 10/28 @5pm
Muskie Archives 201
Born and raised in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Dur e Aziz Amna is the author of A Splintering (Dzanc Books 2025), winner of the Stanfords Prize for Fiction and a BBC Book Club pick. Her previous novel, American Fever (Arcade 2022) won the South Asian Book Award and the APALA Award for Literature. Her work also appears in the New York Times, Financial Times, and Al Jazeera, among others. She was selected as Forbes’ “30 Under 30” in 2022, and has won the Salam Prize and the Financial Times / Bodley Head Essay Prize. She is a graduate of Yale College and the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
For more information, contact Prof. Jess Anthony at janthony@bates.edu.