Central Library, 6th Floor

On Friday, February 21, join the English Department for its annual Hermanns Lecture Series. This year's theme is "Rooted Narratives: Writing Family Histories." Organizers have an incredible roster of creative writers who each approach this topic from different genres and angles.

The readings and Q&A will take place between 9am-noon on the sixth floor of the Central Library.

Claire Lombardo's debut novel, The Most Fun We Ever Had, was an instant New York Times bestseller and has been translated or is forthcoming in over a dozen languages. Her second novel, Same As It Ever Was, was released in June 2024 from Doubleday Books. Claire is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, SMOTHER (forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), Hundred-Year Wave (2016) and Copperhead (2011), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Rachel received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award and the Theodore Roethke Prize. She is currently Distinguished Visiting Writer at St. Mary's College of California's MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Catina Bacote is a nonfiction writer from New Haven, Connecticut. Her book project chronicling the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on families and communities will be published by Holt in 2026. She is a 2024 Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indignity, and Transnational Migration. Among other honors, Bacote has received fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and the American Association of University Women. She is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and currently she serves as assistant professor of English at Trinity College.

Arts & Culture