LITERARY FESTIVAL AND SIGNATURE EVENTS
A highly anticipated annual tradition, the Villanova Literary Festival takes place each spring. The festival hosts major poets and fiction writers on campus to give readings and meet with students.
Visiting fiction writers have included Jonathan Franzen, Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Chang-Rae Lee, Junot Diaz, Lydia Davis, and Diana Abu-Jaber. Poets have included Marilyn Chin, Robert Creeley, Mark Doty, and Harryette Mullen.
Sponsored by the English Department, this event reflects our commitment to celebrating and cultivating the ongoing role of literature in American life.
Please enjoy our back catalogue of speaker videos here.
Lit Fest 2027 Speakers
January 28: Daisy Fried
Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry: My Destination, The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew Fellowships.
Daisy Fried, retrieved from daisyfried.com
March 11: Leontia Flynn
Leontia Flynn has published four poetry collections with Jonathan Cape: These Days (2004), Drives (2008), Profit and Loss (2011) and The Radio (2017), for which she has won an Eric Gregory Award, The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, The Rooney Prize for Irish Writing, a Major Individual Artist’s Award from the Arts Council NI, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature, the AWB Vincent Literary Award and The Irish Times Poetry Now Award.
Leontia Flynn, retrieved from rsliterature.org
April 8: Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the author of three novels and two short story collections—most recently, Exit Zero, Electric Literature‘s #1 collection of 2025. Her novel Beautyland was an American Book Award winner, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist, a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. Bertino is the recipient of two O. Henry Prizes, the Pushcart Prize, and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Yale University, where she is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence.
Marie-Helene Bertino by Ted Dodson, Courtesy of Crown Publishers, retrieved from NPR
April 22: Kenan Orhan
Kenan Orhan’s collection, I Am My Country and Other Stories, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and longlisted for The Story Prize. His fiction appears in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly, The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories. His first novel, The Renovation, is a 2026 Booker Prize nominee.
Kenan Orhan, retrieved from kenanorhan.com
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