Reading Series

Thursday, 12 February 2026, 7:45pm, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, On the Rooftop, was a Reese Witherspoon “Reese’s Book Club” pick for September 2022. Her novel, The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and a George Garrett New Writing Award; was a California and Northern California Book Award finalist, a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Finalist and a Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing finalist; was nominated for the 2020 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook's Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her work has been published in Zyzzyva, The Paris Review; O, The Oprah Magazine; The New York Times Book Review; and other publications. She lives in Oakland with her family.

Tuesday, 7 October 2025, 7:45pm, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. Her books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late.

Thursday, 28 August 2025, 7:45pm, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium

Laleh Khadivi is the author of three novels. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a NEA fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Stanford Stein Fellowship and the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writer Award, among others. Her fourth book, Female Life on Planet Earth, will be out Fall 2026 with Ecco/HarperCollins.

Thursday, 28 August 2025, 7:45pm, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium

Dave Madden is the author of a nonfiction book, The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy, and the story collection If You Need Me I'll Be Over There. His essays have appeared in Defector, the Guardian, Lit Hub, Harper's, Creative Nonfiction, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and he's the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He's been teaching nonfiction at USF since 2013 and is currently revising a memoir on queer sex and shame.

Thursday, 28 August 2025, 7:45pm, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium

D. A. Powell’s most recent collections are “Low Hanging Fruit,” (Foundlings Press, 2022) and “Atlas T” (Rescue Press, 2020). He’s the author of 5 books, 3 chapbooks and co-author of a collaborative experimental memoir. Over the years he has served as poetry editor for Electronic Poetry Review, Lo-Ball and Mumber Magazine; he’s co-edited an essay collection on poet Dunstan Thompson and was one of the many editors who contributed to the Graywolf anthology New European Poets. In 2011 he was the judge for the Best New Poets anthology. His honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a California Book Award and being named both the Wallace Stevens Poet in Hartford Connecticut and the Allen Ginsberg Poet in Residence at Naropa Institute in Boulder in 2020, a year in which he sadly could do neither.

Thursday, 28 August 2025, 7:45pm, Fromm Hall 120 - Xavier Auditorium

Preeti Vangani is an Indian poet & writer based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry collections Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers, forthcoming from River River Books (Feb 2026). Her work has been published in Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner and many other places. She earned an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program.