The 12th Annual Villanova Literary Festival will feature the following writers. All readings are free and are followed by a reception and book signing.

Elizabeth Strout, fiction writer

Tuesday, Jan. 26 (7 pm, Connelly Center)

Elizabeth Strout is the author of Abide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. In 2009 she was honored with a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge (2008), a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her immediate family and friends on the coast of Maine.

Arthur Phillips, fiction writer

Thursday, Feb. 11 (7 pm, Connelly Center)

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis in 1969 and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. His first novel, Prague, a national bestseller, was named a New York Times Notable Book, and received The Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for best first novel. His second novel, The Egyptologist, was a national and international bestseller, and was on more than a dozen “Best of 2004” lists. Angelica, his third novel, was a national bestseller and made The Washington Post best fiction of 2007 list. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages. The Song Is You is his fourth novel.

Anthony Swofford, fiction writer

Thursday, Feb. 18 (7 pm, Connelly Center)

Anthony Swofford is the New York Times best-selling author of Jarhead and Exit A. He served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the first Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at the University of California, Davis and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at Lewis & Clark College and Saint Mary's College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The Guardian and other publications. Jarhead was made into a major motion picture. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York City, where he is at work on a novel.

Ange Mlinko, poet

Tuesday, April 13 (7 pm, Connelly Center)

Ange Mlinko is the author of two books, Matinees (Zoland Books, 1999) and Starred Wire (Coffee House Press, 2005) which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004, and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. She was born in Philadelphia, and currently lives in Beirut, Lebanon. She has lived and worked in Providence, Boston, and Morocco. She has taught poetry at Brown, the Naropa University Summer Writing Program, and Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. Her poems are about urban life, about language and its failings, about the things we see and do not see. She is often compared to Frank O’Hara. The New Yorker praised her “unique sense of humor and mystery.”

Peter Fallon with Seamus Heaney, poets

Tuesday, April 20 (7 pm, Connelly Center)

Peter Fallon is a poet and the founder of The Gallery Press, which is recognized as Ireland’s pre-eminent literary publishing house. His collections of poems include The Speaking Stones (1978), Winter Work (1983), The News and Weather (1987), Eye to Eye (1992) and The Deerfield Series: Strength of Heart (1997). Wake Forest published his selected poems, News of the World, in 1993. He received the 1993 O’Shaughnessy Poetry Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute. He has been Poet in Residence at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and, in the spring of 2000, he was the inaugural Heimbold Professor of Irish Studies at Villanova, which also conferred on him an honorary doctorate.

Seamus Heaney’s first collection of poetry, Death of a Naturalist, appeared more than forty years ago. Since then he has published poetry, criticism, and translations that have established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.