Award-winning poet Maya Marshall, author of All the Blood Involved in Love, will read from her work at 6:00 p.m. on October 28 at Labyrinth Books in Princeton. Amy Liu, Roya Reese, George Tidmore, Emma Tsoglin, Avery Danae Williams, and Destine Harrison-Williams, seniors in Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing, will also read from their recent work. This event continues 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.
Maya Marshall. Photo credit: Ashley Kaushinger
Maya Marshall is a poet, essayist, and editor. A recipient of the 2024 Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, she is the author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love and the chapbook Secondhand. Marshall co-founded underbelly, the journal on the “practical magic of poetic revision,” and she has been awarded grants and fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem, Sewanee’s Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and Emory University. Her poems and essays have been published in or are forthcoming in numerous collections and publications including Prose for the People (Penguin Random House, 2025), American Poetry Review, the Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and Best New Poets. Marshall serves as poetry director for Haymarket Books and as a program consultant for the Writing Freedom Fellowship, a literary fellowship for system-impacted writers. Previously on faculty at Northwestern University and Emory University, she is currently an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University.
The six 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.
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.
