Best-selling novelist and incoming 2025-26 Hodder Fellow Ayana Mathis (The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Unsettled) and National Book Award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker (Calligraphies, A Stranger’s Mirror) read from their recent work in the 2024-25 Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series.

About the Authors:

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, including Calligraphies, Desesperanto, Blazons, and A Stranger’s Mirror, as well as two collaborative books, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema Shehabi, and A Different Distance, written with Karthika Naïr. Her twenty-two volumes of translations from the French include Claire Malroux’s Daybreak, Samira Negrouche’s The Olive Trees’ Jazz, and Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues. She is a past recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award, the Poets’ Prize, the National Book Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN Voelcker Award, and the Argana International Poetry Prize from the Beit as-Shir/House of Poetry in Morocco. She lives in Paris and New York.

Ayana Mathis is a novelist and essayist based in New York City. Her most recent book is The Unsettled, which was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, as well as a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Oprah Daily. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times bestseller, a selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, and a New York Times Notable Book and NPR Best Book of 2013. Additionally, the book was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, T Magazine, The Financial Times, RollingStone, Guernica and Glamour. Mathis received her M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is pursuing her Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary. A 2024-25 Berlin Prize Fellow, she currently teaches at Hunter College in the M.F.A. Program.