As part of the St. Louis Literary Award series of programs honoring 2024 award recipient Jamaica Kincaid, the Saint Louis University Campus Read Book Talk Series offers opportunities to explore the themes of Kincaid’s work.

Kincaid explores themes of colonialism, gender and sexuality, racism, class, and familial relationships in her work. The 2024 Campus Readbook talks will feature conversations about other aspects of her work, including gardening and conversations about anti-colonialism.

She came to the United States as a teenager and, as a young woman, began writing columns and stories for Ingénue, The Village Voice, and Ms. Her work has also appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker.

Kincaid published her first book in 1983, “At the Bottom of the River,” a collection of short stories and reflections. She is the author of the novels “Annie John,” “Lucy,” and “See Now Then,” and the more personal books “The Autobiography of My Mother,” “Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya,” and “My Brother,” which explores the death from AIDS of her younger brother. 

The Campus Read Book talk series is open to the public via Zoom. 

2024 Campus Read Book Talk Series

Jonathan Galassi, Feb. 6

Jonathan Galassi attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College and Cambridge University, where he earned an M.A. in 1973. Galassi became an editor in the trade division of Houghton Mifflin Company in 1973. He was a senior editor at Random House from 1981 to 1986, joining Farrar, Straus and Giroux as vice-president and executive editor. He was named editor-in-chief of FSG in 1988, executive vice-president in 1993, publisher in 1999, and president of the firm in January 2002.

He has published two books of poems: Morning Run (Paris Review Editions, 1988) and North Street (HarperCollins, 2000). He has also translated several volumes of the work of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale.

This event is slated for 1 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 6.

Nathanial Millet, Feb. 27

Nathanial Millet is a historian of the early modern and 19th-century Atlantic World. He is particularly interested in the experience of indigenous and African people in southeastern North America and the Caribbean. His work is comparative, trans-regional, and interdisciplinary. His published works include "The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World" (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013) and numerous compelling journal articles. Millet has also published on the history and memory of slavery at Saint Louis University.

This event is slated for 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 27.

Dillon Brown, March 21

Dillon Brown has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently an associate professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses more centrally on Anglophone Caribbean literature, though it ranges across several other areas, including Black and Asian British literature, world literature, global modernisms, diaspora, migration, hemispheric American literature, and Anglophone postcolonial literature.

His first monograph, "Migrant Modernism: London and the Postwar West Indian Novel" (University of Virginia Press, 2013), examines the interrelations between the foundational postwar novels written by Anglophone Caribbean authors and the British modernist tradition. He has also coedited a collection of essays, and his works have appeared in a number of scholarly periodicals.

He was awarded the Maxwell C. Weiner Humanities Research Grant in 2015 and the J. William Fulbright Research Grant in 2004-2005.

This event is slated for 3 p.m. Thursday, March 21.

Ian Frazier, April 2

Ian Frazier has contributed to The New Yorker since 1974, when he published his first piece in The Talk of the Town. A year later, the magazine ran his first short story, “The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo.” Since then, he has published numerous short stories, as well as nonfiction, Shouts & Murmurs, and Talk of the Town pieces, in the magazine.

In 2012, he revived the annual Christmas poem, “Greetings, Friends!,” originated by Frank Sullivan in 1933. Frazier’s 13 books include “Great Plains” (which ran as a three-part series in the magazine), “Family,” “On the Rez,” and “Travels in Siberia.”

He has twice won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, for his collections, “Dating Your Mom” (1985) and “Lamentations of the Father” (2008). His most recent book is “Cranial Fracking” (2021), another humor collection. Most of the pieces in those three books also appeared in The New Yorker.

This event is slated for 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, April 2.

St. Louis Literary Award 

The St. Louis Literary Award is presented annually by the Saint Louis University Libraries and has become one of the top literary prizes in the country. The award honors a writer who deepens our insight into the human condition and expands the scope of our compassion. Some of the most important writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have come to Saint Louis University to accept the honor, including Margaret Atwood, Salmon Rushdie, Eudora Welty, John Updike, Saul Bellow, August Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Zadie Smith and Tom Wolfe.