Big names, rising stars at Writers Week May 5-8

UC Riverside's annual festival of prose and poetry kicks off May 5 and runs through May 8, with a diverse slate of presenters, including several of today's most distinguished authors.

Writers Week, California's longest-running free literary festival, marks its 49th year with readings by 11 fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets, who will also take questions from the audience. UCR undergraduate students can nab a free copy of the authors' latest books, of which 25 copies of each will be available at the readings.

A complete schedule can be viewed on the festival's website. All events, which are open to the public, will be held in Room 1113 of the Interdisciplinary South Building at the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Parking in Lot 1 is free for attendees. Complimentary beverages and snacks will be offered.

The festival's co-directors are Josh Emmons and Allison Benis White, both professors of creative writing at UCR.

"We're excited to bring a wide slate of writers to campus so that our students and the broader Riverside community can listen to and interact with them in person," Emmons said. "Literature began as an oral tradition - Homer's 3,000-year-old epic 'The Odyssey' will be released as a Christopher Nolan-directed film in July, by the way - and comes uniquely alive when read aloud."

The festival also will include readings of work by UCR undergraduate students and MFA students.

The first day will be devoted to readings by queer Latinx writers. In the morning, Uruguayan American author Caro De Robertis, who uses they/them pronouns, will read from their work. The first nonbinary recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, De Robertis is recognized for an approach to history and mythology that rejects traditional gender binaries. They are the author of "The Palace of Eros" (2024), which won the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award; "The President and the Frog" (2021), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; and "Cantoras" (2019) and "The Gods of Tango" (2015), both of which won a Stonewall Book Award.

In the afternoon, novelists Anel Flores, author of "Curtains of Rain" (2025) and "Empanada" (2012), and A.M. Sosa, author of "And I'll Take Out Your Eyes" (2025), will read from their work. At 4:30 p.m., all three authors will take part in an hour-long panel discussion on queer Latinx literature.

Prominent authors at this year's festival are:

Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel, "The Sympathizer" (2015), was a cultural sensation. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into an HBO mini-series starring Robert Downey Jr. Nguyen has received a MacArthur Fellowship and is also the author of a memoir, "A Man of Two Faces" (2023); "The Committed" (2021), a sequel to "The Sympathizer"; and "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His most recent work, "To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other" (2025), explores questions of writing literature as an outsider.

Jonathan Lethem, a genre-bending writer recognized for works that mash up a "high" literary style with pop-culture tropes like superheroes and hardboiled private detectives. His breakthrough novel, "Motherless Brooklyn" (1999), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was made into a 2019 film with an all-star cast. Lethem has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and is the author of more than 20 other books, including "The Fortress of Solitude" (2003), "Chronic City" (2009), "A Gambler's Anatomy" (2016), and "Brooklyn Crime Novel" (2023).

Ilya Kaminsky, whose 2019 poetry collection "Deaf Republic" catapulted him to international fame. (The BBC World Service named him one of 12 artists who changed the world in 2019.) "Deaf Republic" was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He won the prestigious Dorset Prize for his debut poetry collection, "Dancing in Odessa" (2004). Recently, Kaminsky and his wife, the poet Katie Farris, translated work by the Ukrainian poet Lesyk Panasiuk, who also serves in Ukraine's armed forces, for the book "Letters of the Alphabet Go to War" (2026).

D.A. Powell, who is considered one of the most influential American poets of the 21st century. His work is known for its technical innovation - specifically, the use of landscape-page orientation - and exploration of the AIDS epidemic, queer desire, and the natural world. Powell rose to prominence with a trilogy of poetry collections about the gay experience during the AIDS epidemic. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for "Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys" (2012). He is also the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the California Book Award.

The festival also will feature the essayist Emily Weinstein, who will read from her debut memoir, "Turn to Stone" (2025); José Vadi, the author of "Chipped: Writing from a Skateboarder's Lens" (2024) and "Inter State: Essays from California" (2021); Prageeta Sharma, a poet and professor of English at Pomona College, whose book "Grief Sequence" (2019) was a finalist for the Four Quartets Prize; and Emily Doyle, who earned an MFA at UCR and whose short story collection, "Please Don't Touch the Body," and debut novel, "Encounter," are both forthcoming from Bloomsbury Publishing.