• Wednesday, October 1st 4:30pm (Talk)

Vanderbilt University professor Akshya Saxena will be featured at the CHI Wednesday Salon at The Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum, 197 South Pleasant Street, Amherst College.   Their new book, Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India will be discussed by Amherst professors Anston Bosman & Pooja Rangan.   For more information, see here.

• Wednesday, October 1st at 7:00pm (Reading)

Brock Clarke & Jeff Parker will read from recent work.   Clark is author of numerous books, including novels, short story collections, & essays. His latest book is collection of short stories, Special Election.   Clarke been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, & an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.   Parker, who teaches here at UMass in the M.F.A Program, is author of numerous books & novels, including Where Bears Roam the Streets: A Russian Journal, the novel Ovenman, & the short story collection The Taste of Penny.   His most recent work is a novella, “G v. P” in the anthology, Proper Imposters: Four Novellas.   He is the Co-Founder & Director of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

• Thursday, October 2nd at 7:00pm (Reading)

Sarona Abuaker & Tarik Dobbs will read from recent work in the Red Room, Converse Hall, Amherst College, as part of the An evening of Transnational Arab Literature & Arabic Music.   Abuaker a poet, artist, & educational outreach worker.   They has been published in Berfrois, MAP Magazine, the 87press’ Digital Poetics series, KOHL, Ludd Gang, Senna Hoy, & other platforms.  Their debut poetry collection, Why so few women on the street at night, published by the 87Press, is a queer phenomenology of collective Palestinian futurisms & memory building.   Dobbs is a writer, artist, & Poetry Foundation Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.   Poems by Dobbs have been featured in the anthologies Best New Poets, & Heaven Looks Like Us, as well as in AGNI ,American Poetry Review, & Poetry Magazine, among others.   Their debut poetry collection is Nazar Boy.   For more information on the poets, see the Amherst College Creative Writing Center Visiting Writers Series events listing.

• Saturday, October 4th at 6:00pm (Talk & party)

University of Massachusetts historian Diana Sierra Becerra will be featured at a fundraiser at Sub Rosa, 33b West Street, Northampton, MA. She‘ll talk about her new book The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in El Salvador.   The book covers five decades of struggle, from 1965 to 2015, telling the stories of peasant & working-class women who organized class struggle against landowners, military officers, & imperialists.   As a public scholar, Becerra collaborated with Salvadoran & U.S. museums & art galleries as well as global networks of historic sites.   At the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador, she curated exhibitions & developed educational programming.  And the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, which organizes food system workers in three counties in Western Massachusetts, she used her popular education training to cultivate worker leadership.

• Tuesday, October 7th at 7:00pm (Reading)

Sofia Samatar will read from recent work at the The Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum, 197 South Pleasant Street, Amherst College, as part of the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.   Samatar is a writer of fiction & nonfiction, including the memoir The White Mosque, a PEN/Jean Stein Award finalist.   Her works range from the World Fantasy Award-winning novel A Stranger in Olondria to Opacities: On Writing & the Writing Life, a National Book Critics Circle Award Longlist selection.   Her 2024 novella, The Practice, the Horizon, & the Chain was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick, Nebula, & Hugo Awards.

• Wednesday, October 15th at 4:30pm (Book launch party)

William Taubman, Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science, Emeritus, at Amherst College, will talk about his new book, McNamara at War: A New History co-authored with Philip Taubman, at the The Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum, 197 South Pleasant Street, Amherst College.   Taubman is author of the Gorbachev: His Life & Times , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.   His biography, Khrushchev: The Man & His Era, won both the Pulitzer Prize & the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2004.   He is also the author of Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Détente to Cold War, & co-author with his wife, retired Amherst College professor of Russian Jane Taubman, of Moscow Spring.

• Saturday, October 18th at 6:00pm (Poetry reading)

Emily Bludworth de Barrios will read with Kristin Bock, Ian Fishman, & Emily Hunerwadel.  Bludworth de Barrios’s recent books include Rich Wife, recipient of the Four Lakes Prize; & Shopping or The End of Time, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry.   Her poems have appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, & Oxford Poetry.  She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts here in Amherst.   Bock also holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts where she teaches.   Her first collection, CLOISTERS, won Tupelo Press’s First Book Award & the da Vinci Eye Award.   She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow, & her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Columbia, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, & VERSE, among others.   Fishman publishes & edits Press Brake, a chapbook vehicle.   Recent poems & writings can be found in b l u s h & BOMB. His most recent chapbook is Calm Down!.   Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship, & Peach Woman, selected by Doublecross Press for their Bound-Together contest.   Their work has been featured by the Academy of American Poets, Bustle, Fonograf Editions, the Vassar Review.

• Monday, October 20th at 4:00pm (Talk)

Juliet Schor will talk about her new book, Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, & Working Smarter at the Political Economy Research Institute, Gordon Hall, 418 N. Pleasant St., UMass, Amherst.   Schor is an American economist & Sociology Professor at Boston College.  She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work & family, women’s issues & economic inequality, & concerns about climate change in the environment. 

• Monday, October 20th at 4:00pm (Reading)

Nalini Jones will read from her new novel, The Unbroken Coast.,   Jones is the author of a story collection, What You Call Winter.   Her writing has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, Guernica, Elle India, Scroll, & numerous other publications in the U.S. & India. She has been awarded a National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship, among other honors, and her short story “Tiger” was selected for O. Henry & Pushcart prizes.

• Tuesday, October 21st at 4:30pm (Talk)

Matteo Pasquinelli will talk about his research at the The Aliki Perroti & Seth Frank Lyceum, 197 South Pleasant Street, Amherst College.   His most recent book is The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence.   Pasquinelli is Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy & Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice where he is coordinating the 5-year ERC project AIMODELS.

• Wednesday, October 22nd at 5:45pm (Talk)

Carlo Rotello will talk about his new book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching & Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics at South College W245, UMass, Amherst.   Rotella is professor of English at Boston College.   A regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he has written books about cities, boxing, music, & literature.   His new book follows thirty-three students through his class to provide an intimate look at teaching & learning from their perspectives as well as his own.   The students’ reluctance—“How does this get me a job?”—transforms into insight as they wrestle with challenging books, share ideas, discover how to think critically, & form a community.

• Wednesday, October 22nd at 7:00pm (Readings)

Amherst College professors George Abraham, Sony Coráñez Bolton, & Pooja Rangan, will read from recent work at the CHI Think Tank, 197 South Pleasant Street, Amherst College, as part of the Amherst College Visiting Writers Series.   Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, performance artist.  They are the author of Birthright, which won the Arab American Book Award & was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.   They are the Editor-at-Large of Mizna, & co-editor of Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry.   Coráñez Bolton is author of Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, & the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines, & the new Dos X: Disability & Racial Dysphoria in Latinx & Filipinx Culture.   Rangan is the author of, most recently, of The Documentary Audit: Listening & the Limits of Accountability which explores how justice-driven practices of listening can both entrench systems of exclusion & open possibilities for transformation; & Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2019 Harry Levin Prize for an outstanding first book.

• Thursday, October 23rd at 6:00pm (Poetry reading)

Garth Greenwell will read in Bernie Dallas Room, Goodell Hall, UMass, Amherst, as part of the MFA for Poets & Writers Visiting Writers Series.   Greenwell is author, most recently, of the novel Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.   Earlier books include, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, & was a finalist for many other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the LA Times Book Prize, & the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; & Cleanness, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award & was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize,   the Prix Sade, among others.   A New York Times Notable Book, it was named a Best Book of 2020 by over thirty publications.   Greenwell is the inaugural Merry & Daniel Glosband Writer in Residence, a new residency program hosted by the UMass MFA.

• Saturday, October 25th at 2:00pm (Concert)

Enliven your autumnal browsing with some ancient timbres, modes, & melodies.   Birds on a Briar, under the direction of Susan Matsui , will perform Ma Tredol & other gems of the Middle Ages on period instruments of the blown, plucked, strummed, & bowed variety.

• Monday, October 27th at 4:30pm (Talk)

CanceledRobert Chandler will talk about his translation from the Russian of Andrey Platonov’s novel, Chevengur, in 202 Webster Hall, Amherst College.   Chandler is a distinguished translator best known for his translations from Russian, bringing major twentieth-century works to the English audience.  Chevengur is the magnum opus of the fiction writer Andrey Platonov, whose works from the early Soviet era remained little known until the 1980s but are now considered masterpieces.   In collaboration with Elizabeth Chandler & others, he has published four books of Platonov’s prose with NYRB Classics for which he has won prizes in the UK & the US.   His translations of Vasily Grossman, also published with NYRB, are another landmark achievement.   Sponsored by the Amherst Center for Russian Culture.

• Tuesday, October 28th at 5:00pm (Talk)

University of Massachusetts historian Diana Sierra Becerra will talk about her new book The Making of Revolutionary Feminism in El Salvador in the Old Chapel, UMass, Amherst .   The book covers five decades of struggle, from 1965 to 2015, telling the stories of peasant & working-class women who organized class struggle against landowners, military officers, & imperialists.   As a public scholar, Becerra collaborated with Salvadoran & U.S. museums & art galleries as well as global networks of historic sites.   At the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen in San Salvador, she curated exhibitions & developed educational programming.  And the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, which organizes food system workers in three counties in Western Massachusetts, she used her popular education training to cultivate worker leadership.   For more information, see here.

• Wednesday, October 29th at 6:00pm (Talk & reading)

Jericho Brown will talk about & read from his poetry in Johnson Chapel, Amherst College.   Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award & fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, & the National Endowment for the Arts.   Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award.   His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award & was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, & the Academy of American Poets.   He is also the author of the collection The Tradition, which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award & the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

• Thursday, October 30th at 7:00pm (Poetry reading)

Poets Carolyn Zaikowski & David Need will read from recent work.   Carolyn Zaikowski is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, death doula, & the current Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts.   She is author of the novel, A Child is Being Killed & most recently of poetry collection In a Dream I Dance by Myself & Collapse.   David Need lives in Durham, NC, & has taught Asian Religions & Religion & Literature there since 1997.   He has published two collections of his own poetry & two of translations of Rilke.   He’ll read from his recent retrospective—Broken Windows.