Join us on Tuesday, November 18 at 7:30pm to hear two excellent poets share their work on Zoom!

Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and author of The Importance of Being Feeble-Minded (Nine Mile Books, 2025). His poems and essays have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and swamp pink, as well as the anthologies The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, Love Is for All of Us: Poems of Tenderness and Belonging from the LGBTQ+ Community and Friends, Mid/South Sonnets: A Belle Point Press Anthology, and The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. He is editor of Queerly and has read his poems at Penn, Vanderbilt, Yale, and elsewhere.

Vivek Narayanan was born in India to Tamil parents and grew up in Zambia. He earned a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Stanford University and a master’s in creative writing from Boston University. He taught at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the late 90s and from the mid-2000s worked at Sarai-CSDS, a center for experimental practice and theory in New Delhi, in addition to being a Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019. Narayanan's books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S and, most recently, After (NYRB Poets, 2022) and The Kuruntokai and its Mirror (Hanuman Editions, 2024). A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. He has been a Radcliffe Fellow (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16).

His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like Poetry, The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry.

At George Mason University, in addition to teaching in the MFA program, Narayanan is a Co-Editorial Director of the Mason-housed website Poetry Daily and sits on the board of the Cheuse International Writers Center.

The link to register is bit.ly/WTUI_Nov2025 – see you there!