National Book Award Author to Deliver Writers' Week Keynote

As part of the Buckner Lecture Series, National Book Award winner Justin Torres will be the keynote speaker for the Fall 2024 Writers’ Week Symposium, sponsored by the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. Torres’ latest novel, Blackouts, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2023 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and numerous other honors. Torres will read from his novel at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 31, in Lumina Theater.  

Writers' Week, Oct. 28-Nov. 1, brings together visiting writers of local and national interest, publishing professionals, UNCW students and members of the public with an interest in literature. This year’s theme, “Both/And,” explores the fluidity of artistic expression across boundaries of genre, mode and medium. Through readings, craft talks, panels and generative sessions, the week will celebrate the ways artists refuse limits in pursuit of their vision, in service of vivid and dynamic storytelling. Guests will include poets who are also translators, prose writers who report and invent, makers who employ both language and image, and artists who are also activists, editors and teachers. 

Along with Blackouts, Justin Torres is the author of the novel We the Animals, which was a national bestseller. Torres is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow who has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of English at UCLA. 

 Other participating writers and publishing professionals include Assistant Art Director Janay Nachel Frazier, poet Diamond Forde, poet Kristin Emmanuel, memoirist and novelist Tessa Fontaine, poet and translator Michael Bazzett, and memoirist Jaquira Díaz, as well as writers and artists from UNCW and Wilmington’s community. For a full schedule, visit the Writers Week event website. All events are free and open to the public. Book signing receptions sponsored by the department and UNCW’s bookstore will follow evening readings.    

 For further information on UNCW’s programs and events in creative writing, please contact the Department of Creative Writing at 910.962.7063.