-
Laia Jufresca, Author Event on Monday, September 21 at 12:15
Laia Jufresa is a Mexican author, based in Scotland. Her debut novel,
Umami, has been widely translated and won the PEN Translates award.
Since 2020 she leads "escribir es un lugar" (writing is a place), a thriving
online community where she's helped over 200 women establish a
writing practice. Wishbone is her first book written in English. -
Johanna Zwirner, Wednesday, September 30 at 12:15 PM
Johanna Zwirner is an Assistant Editor at Doubleday. She has worked with Hua Hsu, Neil Irvin Painter, Maaza Mengiste, Amanda Hess, Eric Puchner, and Kyle Chayka. She studied English at Barnard College and worked in the editorial department at Kirkus Reviews before joining Doubleday.
-
Shapiro Interns Panel, Tuesday, October 6 at 12:15 pm
2026 Shapiro Internship Recipients:
Janhavi Munde, The New York Review of Books
Tess Lieber, Archipelago Books
Phoebe Mulder, Decoder Ring podcast - Slate Magazine
-
Toni Morrison: Writer, Editor, Critic on October 22 at 5 pm
Born in Lusaka, Zambia, Namwali Serpell is the author of two novels: The Old Drift (2019), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the Grand Prix des Associations Littéraires Prize for Belles-Lettres, and the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; and The Furrows (2022), named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, Time, and many other publications. She is a Professor of English at Harvard University and has published two books of criticism: Seven Modes of Uncertainty (2014) and Stranger Faces (2020), which was long listed for a Believer Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her many honors include a Windham-Campbell Prize and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. This year, she is a Distinguished-Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University.
Autumn Womack is an Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and was a finalist for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. In 2023, she curated the critically acclaimed archival exhibition Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory. Her next book, The Wanderer, a story of Toni Morrison’s creative practice as told through the archive, is forthcoming from Knopf. She has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, The Leon Levy Center for Biography, MacDowell, and Yaddo.
Dana A. Williams is professor of African American Literature and dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. She is former president of the Modern Language Association and the College Language Association and a current board member of the National Humanities Alliance and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her latest book is Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer's Legendary Editorship, which was long-listed for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction and which won the best book prize for the College Language Association, the Toni Morrison Society, and American Library Association Black Caucus.
-
Oct 29 - 30, Wesleyan Magazine Symposium
A symposium bringing together leading magazine editors for conversations on publishing, craft, criticism, and the future of media.
The Magazine Symposium at Wesleyan University is a two-day event that will convene prominent editors for talks and seminars on the craft and business of magazines. These sessions are designed to appeal to working writers and editors as well as students and aspiring staffers. Sessions will speak to all parts of the publishing process—founding a magazine, creating a style guide, building a stable of writers, fact checking, and more—and will engage with larger questions about the state of media in a changing culture. The event will be held over October 29th and 30th on Wesleyan's campus.
Attendees will include editors from The Drift, Granta, The Believer, The Point, The New York Times Magazine, n+1, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's, The Yale Review, and The New York Review of Books, among others.
The Symposium schedule and more details will be announced in the coming weeks.
The event is free and open to the public but registration is required. Register here. -
The Two Saddest Kitchens: A Comics Conversation, Thursday, November 19 at 12:15 pm
Wesleyan professor and cartoonist Sophia Warren talks with #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Roz Chast and her fellow New Yorker cartoonist Jason Adam Katzenstein about their new book, The Two Saddest Kitchens, where they rip the Tupperware lid off what's really going on in their kitchens.
Note: This event will take place at RJ Julia Bookstore, 413 Main St in Middletown.
-
Brenda Hillman, WesPress X Shapiro Reading, Tuesday, December 1 at 5 pm
Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of twelve full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are In A Few Minutes Before Later (2022), Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award. In 2024, she published her first book of prose essays, Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality.