The Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University, continues the 2024-25 season with a reading by bestselling novelist Ayana Mathis, author of The Unsettled and The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, and Marilyn Hacker, a National Book Award-winning poet, translator, and author of Calligraphies and A Stranger’s Mirror. The reading begins at 6:00 p.m. on March 18 at Labyrinth Books in Princeton. The event is free and open to the public, with the authors’ 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.
Ayana Mathis. Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Ayana Mathis is a novelist and essayist based in New York City. Her most recent novel, The Unsettled, was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, as well as a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Oprah Daily. Her first book, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times bestseller, a selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, and a New York Times Notable Book and NPR Best Book of 2013. Additionally, the novel was long listed for the 2014 Dublin Literary Award and named a finalist for Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 2013 Legacy Award in Fiction. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The Atlantic, T Magazine, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica, Glamour, and elsewhere. Her most recent nonfiction, a five-part New York Times essay series entitled Imprinted by Belief, explores the intertwining of faith and American literature. Mathis received her M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is pursuing her Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary. A 2024-25 Berlin Prize Fellow, she currently teaches at Hunter College in the M.F.A. Program.
Recently announced as a 2025-26 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, Mathis said she plans to spend the coming year working on a memoir-in-essays entitled My Brief Salvation, a collection of critical and personal essays about iterations of belief in literature, political life, and her own formative years in Philadelphia in the turbulent 1980s. In addition to the Hodder Fellowship, her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Marilyn Hacker. Photo credit: Alison Harris
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, including Calligraphies, Desesperanto, Blazons, and A Stranger’s Mirror, as well as two collaborative books, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema Shehabi, and A Different Distance, written with Karthika Naïr. Her 22 volumes of translations from the French include Claire Malroux’s Daybreak, Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz, and Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues. Hacker’s first collection of poems, Presentation Piece, won the 1975 National Book Award and was the Academy of American Poets’ Lamont Poetry Selection. Her other honors include the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets’ Prize, two Lambda Literary Awards, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Argana International Poetry Prize from the Beit as-Shir/House of Poetry in Morocco. Elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2008, Hacker has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Paris and New York.
The Lewis Center’s Program in Creative Writing annually presents the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series, which provides an opportunity for students, as well as all in the greater Princeton region, to hear and meet the best contemporary writers. All readings, unless otherwise noted, take place at 6:00 p.m. at Labyrinth Books and are free and open to the public.
The 2024-25 series will conclude with several student readings. On April 15, select students in spring creative writing courses will read from their recent work, and on April 21 and 22, seniors in the program will read from their independent work in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and literary translation.
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.
