The Marcia Kinsey Visiting Writers Series

Thursday, September 24, 2026 at 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)

Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press) and The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press), which was long-listed for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and a 2026 Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Most recently, he published Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press), winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets and winner of the Burdine C. Johnson Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival VersoFrontera and publisher of Alabrava Press. He was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

Saturday, November 7, 2026 at 3pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)

Mary Helen Specht is the author of the novel Mudlark and the novel Migratory Animals, a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Best First Fiction Award and the Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, and numerous other publications. A Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her family. She was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.

Thursday, January 21, 2027 at 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)

Kirstin Valdez Quade is the author of The Five Wounds, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, Carnegie Medal for Excellence, Aspen Words Literary Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and Maya Angelou Book Award. Her story collection, Night at the Fiestas, won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a “5 Under 35” award from the National Book Foundation. Kirstin is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at Princeton University.

Date to be announced 6pm
Carter Auditorium (JBWS 186)

Poet bio to be announced in late fall.