Award-Winning Writer Maria Dahvana Headley to Speak at Dominican University

River Forest, IL-Dominican University will welcome fantasy author, poet, playwright and translator Maria Dahvana Headley as the featured speaker for the university's 2026 Lund-Gill Lecture.

Headley will present "The Written Word: How Old Stories Help Us to Understand Our Lives" on Tuesday, April 14 at 6 p.m. in Martin Recital Hall, located inside the Performing Arts Center.

Headley is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Beowulf: A New Translation, a reimagination of the Old English epic with modern language, giving the poem a contemporary feel amid a fantastical Anglo-Saxon world. This book was the winner of the Harold Morton Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

"My whole career has been grabbing bits of folklore and repurposing them, and testing out different meters and repurposing them. That's the writer I am," Headley told Slate in a 2020 interview.

Headley is also the author of The Mere Wife, a contemporary novel adaptation of Beowulf set in present-day New York; the young adult fantasy novel Magonia and its sequel, Aerie; Queen of Kings: A Novel of Cleopatra; a musical adaptation of The Aeneid, titled Vergil: A Mythological Musical; and the light-hearted memoir, The Year of Yes.

Headley is a 2020 World Fantasy Award winner and she delivered the Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature at Oxford in 2023.

This year, Headley is serving as Dominican University's 2025-26 Lund-Gill chair. Each year, the selected chair is invited to address themes and issues at the heart of the liberal arts and sciences, and at the intersection of academia and society.

The Lund-Gill Lecture is open to the public and free to attend, but registration is required. Visit https://www.dom.edu/arts-minds/university-events to register.

About Dominican University
Founded in 1901, Dominican University is a comprehensive, coeducational Catholic institution with campuses in River Forest and Chicago. The university offers an associate of arts in liberal arts and sciences; bachelor's and master's degrees through the Rosary College of Arts, Education, and Sciences, the College of Business, Information Studies, and Technology, and the Borra College of Health Sciences; as well as doctoral programs in information studies, applied social justice and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner.

As Chicago's premier Catholic Hispanic-Serving Institution, Dominican is consistently recognized as a leader in academic excellence and value. U.S. News & World Report ranks Dominican University in the top 25 of Midwest regional master's level universities, and #1 in Illinois for Best Value and ensuring the social mobility of its graduates.