TKL Reading Schedules
Danez Smith
The Wittliff Collections
November 5, 2025, 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Danez Smith is the author of four poetry collections: [insert]boy, Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and, most recently, Bluff. They are also the curator of Blues In Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez was won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, as well as an array of grants, fellowships, and residencies including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Princeton Arts Fellowship. Danez lives in the Twin Cities with their people and teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center in St. Paul, MN. (from author website)
Carolyn Finney
The Wittliff Collections
February 26, 2026, 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author and a cultural geographer who is passionate about interrogating our past and dreaming a future that is liberatory, just and green. Dr. Finney is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing – she pursued an acting career for eleven years, but five years of backpacking trips through Africa and Asia and living in Nepal changed the course of her life.
Her first book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors was released in 2014. She is currently working on her new book (creative non-fiction) that takes a more personal journey into the very complicated relationship between race, land & belonging in the United States, and a performance piece entitled The N Word: Nature Revisited. Carolyn is currently a scholar/artist-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College.
Zach Williams
The Wittliff Collections
January 28, 2026, 3:30 p.m.
Zach Williams' debut short story collection, Beautiful Days, was a New Yorker Best Book of 2024, a finalist for the 2025 California Book Award for First Fiction, and longlisted for the 2025 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney's Quarterly Concern. His story “Trial Run” was one of three that won The Paris Review a 2023 ASME Award for Fiction. Williams is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship.
Malika Booker
The Wittliff Collections
March 18, 2026, 3:00-4:30 p.m.
Malika Booker, currently based in Leeds, is a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, a British poet of Guyanese and Grenadian Parentage, and co-founder of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (A writer’s collective). Her pamphlet Breadfruit, (flippedeye, 2007) received a Poetry Society recommendation and her poetry collection Pepper Seed (Peepal Tree Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas prize and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. She is published with the Poets Sharon Olds and Warsan Shire in The Penguin Modern Poet Series 3: Your Family: Your Body (2017). A Cave Canem Fellow, and inaugural Poet in Residence at The Royal Shakespeare Company, Malika was awarded the Cholmondeley Award (2019) for outstanding contribution to poetry and elected a Royal Society of Literature Fellow (2022)