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 2025-26 season with a reading by multiple Pushcart Prizes-winning poet and debut novelist Kaveh Akbar and award-winning poet and prose writer Aracelis Girmay. The reading begins at 6:00 p.m. on November 11 at Labyrinth Books, located at 122 Nassau Street 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.

Kaveh Akbar. Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Kaveh Akbar is the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Martyr!, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2024, and the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine. With Paige Lewis, he co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. His work appears in the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, New Republic, GQ, The Atlantic, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Akbar was the founding editor of Divedapper, and since 2020, has served as poetry editor for The Nation. His writing has been translated into over 30 languages. In addition to multiple Pushcart Prizes, he is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and the Levis Reading Prize, among others. Born in Tehran, Iran, Akbar is the Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa and teaches in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College.

Aracelis Girmay. Photo credit: Yekaterina Gyadu

Aracelis Girmay is a poet who makes work across genres. Her latest book of poems, Green of All Heads, was published in September, and she is also author of the poetry collections the black maria, Kingdom Animalia, and Teeth. She is author and illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth. Her recent works of poetry and prose have been published in e-flux, Astra, The Paris Review Online, Jewish Currents, and Periphery Journal. In 2018, she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Girmay’s awards include a Whiting Award, Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She is the recipient of support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, Cave Canem, and the Community~Word Project, among others. The Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford, Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. She is currently working on a commissioned experiment for the stage with director Dawn M. Simmons and musicians Ashleigh Gordon and Brittany J. Green.

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.

Additional readings in the 2025-26 series include:

• November 18 — Fall student reading featuring new work by creative writing students (4:30 p.m. at Chancellor Green)
• February 17 — Reading by Didi Jackson and Major Jackson
• March 24 — Reading by Kaitlyn Greenidge and Hisham Matar
• April 14 — Spring student reading featuring new work by creative writing students (5 p.m. at Chancellor Green)
• April — Creative writing seniors read from their independent work in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and literary translation (4:30 p.m. at Chancellor Green)

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.