While Ellen Bass has unfortunately had to cancel her participation in this event, the seniors scheduled will still present a reading from their recent work.
Award-winning poet and writer Ellen Bass, author of Indigo and Mules of Love, will read from her work at 6:00 p.m. on October 21 at Labyrinth Books in Princeton. Wyatt Browne, Athena Chu, Avery Gendler, Tacy Guest, and Kelly Kim, seniors in Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing, will also read from their recent work. This event kicks off the 2025-2026 C.K. Williams Reading Series, named after the late Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poet C.K. Williams, who served on Princeton’s faculty for 20 years. The series showcases seniors in the Program in Creative Writing alongside established writers as special guests. Cosponsored by Labyrinth Books, the event is free and open to the public with the author’s books available to purchase and have signed. The bookstore is an accessible venue. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
Ellen Bass. Photo credit: Irene Young
Poet and educator Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poetry, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020 and was named a New & Notable Book by The New York Times. Her previous books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Bass was co-editor with Florence Howe of the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, which was published in 1973. She has also written works of nonfiction, including, with Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages. Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Among her awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes, and the Lambda Literary Award. Bass teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University and lives in Santa Cruz, California.
The five seniors who will read from their work are among 24 Princeton students pursuing minors in creative writing in addition to their major areas of study. Each is currently working on a novel, a nonfiction work, a play or screenplay, or a collection of poems or short stories as part of their creative independent work for the minor. Students in the Program in Creative Writing work closely with a member of the faculty, which includes award-winning writers Katie Farris, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Ilya Kaminsky, Jamil Kochai, Yiyun Li, Patricia Smith, Lloyd Suh, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and several distinguished lecturers and visiting professors.
Next in the 2025-26 series, poet Maya Marshall will read from her work on October 28. The reading series will continue February 10, 2026, with writer and poet Hala Alyan followed by writer and Princeton creative writing alumnus Jordan Salama, Class of 2019, on February 24.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
