Every year, prominent writers present lectures and readings to the Villanova community, followed by a reception and book signing.   Accomplished authors from Ireland, the Virgin Islands, and the United States will be a part of the semester-long event.

In April  the Festival welcomes, Tiphanie Yanique.  Tiphanie is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short story writer. She is the author of the poetry collection, Wife (Peepal Tree Press Ltd., 2015), which won the 2016 Bocas Prize in Caribbean poetry and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Forward/Felix Dennis Prize for a First Collection.

Tiphanie is also the author of the novel,  Land of Love and Drowning, which won the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Award from the Center for Fiction, the Phillis Wheatley Award for Pan-African Literature, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and was listed by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2014.  Land of Love and Drowning (Riverhead Books, 2015) was also a finalist for the Orion Award in Environmental Literature and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

This event begins at 7:00 pm and is free and open to the public.

The Literary Festival is sponsored by the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.