Looking Ahead to LitFest: Illuminating our Guest Speakers

Amherst College’s 10th annual LitFest kicks off this week. The literary festival will run from Thursday to Sunday and feature renowned authors, artists, and intellectuals. In anticipation, The Student has compiled profiles of some of this year’s guest speakers in order of their appearance over the course of the festival.

Jeffrey Wright ’87

Jeffrey Wright is an actor and Amherst alumnus hailing from Washington, D.C. While earning his B.A. in political science at Amherst, he also performed theatre in our very own Fayerweather Hall, with his first experience being a monologue in an adaptation of “Bloods” by student Kevin Frazier ‘89. In 2004, he received an honorary doctorate from the college. He has appeared in many films including “Basquiat” (1996), “Shaft” (2000), “The Hunger Games” series, “The Batman” (2022), and a few James Bond films. He has also frequently worked with the director Wes Anderson, starring in “The French Dispatch” (2021), “Asteroid City” (2023), and the upcoming 2025 film “The Phoenician Scheme.” Wright won a Tony and an Emmy for his portrayal of Norman “Belize” Arriaga in “Angels in America,” in the 1993 Broadway play and the subsequent 2003 HBO series. He also had a main role in the series “Westworld” (2016).

Wright’s performance as Thelonius “Monk” Ellison in his most recent film “American Fiction” (2023), directed by Cord Jefferson and based on Percival Everett’s 2001 book “Erasure,” earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Wright will be in conversation about the making of “American Fiction” alongside Everett, Jefferson, and President Michael Elliott on Friday in Johnson Chapel. The event will be livestreamed, and overflow seating will be available in Lipton Lecture Hall.

Multiple screenings of “American Fiction” will accompany the event: Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 7 p.m. in Kirby Theater; Thursday, Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. in Coolidge Museum of Forbes Library in Northampton; and Friday, Feb. 28, with the location to be announced.

You can also catch his performance in “Basquiat” at Amherst Cinema for free this Sunday at 1:30 p.m. or on March 5 at 7 p.m. with your Amherst College ID!

Percival Everet

Percival Everett is an accomplished writer and professor of English at the University of Southern California. He earned a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Miami, and an M.A. in fiction from Brown University. His first novel, “Suder” (1983), was written while pursuing his master’s degree, and his next novel, “Walk Me to the Distance” (1985), was adapted into a movie. He has published several fiction works, short stories, and a children’s book.

Released in 2001, “Erasure” centers on the pigeonholing that Black writers often experience in order to promote their work. Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” (2023) brought this story to the big screen. Everett’s most recent book, “James” (2024) reimagines “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the title character, an escaped slave. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2024. Everett frequently plays with the idea of the great American novel while highlighting Black experiences. In 2022, Everett won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

After the event with Wright and Cord Jefferson on Friday, Everett will also host a Craft Talk on Saturday, March 1 entitled “Fictive Distance” on the idea of what makes something fiction.

Cord Jefferson

Cord Jefferson is a writer and director from Tucson, Arizona known primarily for his work in television. He attended the College of William & Mary and later got his M.B.A. at New York University (NYU). Initially, Jefferson worked in journalism writing for outlets such as The New York Times, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Huffington Post, and USA Today.  He also worked as an editor for Gawker from 2012-2014. Since 2020, Jefferson has been working on a series for Apple TV+ based on his time writing there. He later found himself writing for successful TV shows like “Succession” (2018-2023), “Master of None” (2015-2021), and “The Good Place” (2016-2020). He also wrote for “Watchmen” (2019), which covers various issues with racism in America using action and sci-fi elements, earning him an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series. Jefferson wrote the screenplay for “American Fiction”—adapted from “Erasure”— and directed the film as his directorial debut. The film has been praised for its engagement with modern and complex issues of race and Black representation, as well as its humor. Jefferson’s film won the Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award, as well as the Academy Award, the British Academy Film Award, and the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, along with numerous other awards and nominations.

Jefferson will host a Career Conversation with students on Friday, Feb. 28.

Teju Cole

Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and professor of creative writing at Harvard University. As a presidential scholar, along with his events at LitFest, Cole will be attending select classes and speaking with students during his short residency here.

He is widely considered a pioneer in modern African literature. In 1996, he received a B.A. from Kalamazoo College and went on to study African art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before earning his Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University. Cole’s first novel was “Every Day is for the Thief” (2007), centered around a Nigerian man returning to Lagos from New York after many years and how much the city changed. His novel “Open City” (2011) is also set in New York City and follows a Nigerian immigrant’s experience through direct insight into the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings during the present, and reflecting on his past. This book won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, amongst many others.

Cole’s most recent release, “Tremor” (2023) uses experiences and stories to put together an image of Tunde, a West African man in New England, and was named Book of the Year by publications including the Washington Post, New York Magazine, and the Financial Times. It won the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. Cole is frequently featured in many publications and had a standing monthly column in the New York Times, On Photography, which was nominated for the 2016 National Magazine Award. Cole has displayed his photography across the world, and served as the jury president for the 2021/2022 Grand Prix Images Vevey in Switzerland.

Cole will be in conversation with Jennifer Acker ’00 on Saturday, March 1 at 5 p.m. in Johnson Chapel.

Cole is also hosting a Craft Talk this Saturday called “Feeling into Words” for students to engage with two short stories they received prior.

Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal is a Chinese-Norwegian-American author and poet from Seattle. She has authored several non-fiction books, with her most recent being “Appropriate: A Provocation” (2021), which focuses on cultural appropriation. She has also published collections of poems including “A Crash of Rhinos” (2000); The Invention of the “Kaleidoscope” (2007); “Nightingale” (2019); and “West: A Translation” (2023) which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the Mountains & Plains Bookseller’s “Reading the West” Poetry Book Award.

Redkal has been the recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea, a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, and the 2019 and 2023 Pushcart Prizes amongst many others. Her work has been featured by major media outlets such as NPR, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and, repeatedly, the Best American Poetry Series. Rekdal earned her B.A. from the University of Washington, her M.A. from the University of Toronto, and her M.F.A from the University of Michigan. She has served as a visiting professor in poetry at Stanford University and at the University of Iowa’s nonfiction writing program. At the University of Utah, Rekdal is currently a professor of creative writing. She is also a poetry editor for High Country News and serves as a co-chair for PEN America’s Utah chapter.

Rekdal will be in conversation alongside poet Brandon Som with Ruth Dickey, the executive director of the National Book Foundation, at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 1 in Kirby Theater.

On Saturday, Rekdal also has a Craft Talk entitled “On Fragments” for students to engage with literary fragments.

Brandon Som

Dr. Brandon Som is a Chinese and Chicano-American poet from Phoenix, Arizona. He earned his B.A. from Arizona State University, his M.F.A from the University of Pittsburgh, and his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He has released numerous poetry collections including “Babel’s Moon”(2011), “The Tribute Horse” (2014), and “Tripas” (2023), which calls upon the stories of his Mexican grandmother and Chinese-American father. “Tripas” won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry in 2023. His work and life story have been featured in Indiana Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, The Interlochen Review, and more. Som was awarded fellowships at Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts as well as Civitella Ranieri. He has previously taught at NYU, Chatham University, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Young Writers Institute. He currently serves as a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego.

Som will be in conversation with Ruth Dickey alongside Rekdal at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 1 in Kirby Theater. That same day, Som will also host “Alive in Verse: Enjambment and Visual Play in Poetry” a Craft Talk for students to study a poem and then create one.

Anthony Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci is a world-renowned medical expert and scientist who became the face of the American response to the Covid pandemic. Fauci earned his B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross in classics and later earned his M.D. from Cornell University. From 1984 to 2022, he served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health. Fauci has served as the advisor to seven U.S. Presidents and conducted research on preventing and treating infectious diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, ebola, zika, and many others. He was instrumental in the handling of the HIV/AIDS crisis, researching the ways that HIV makes human bodies more susceptible to infections, developing treatments, and spearheading President George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2003.

Most recently, Fauci was a key advisor on the public health initiatives to combat Covid until 2022.  He is also prominent in the field of pathogenesis — how diseases develop — and pioneered the field of human immunoregulation, helping shape our understanding of the regulation of the human immune response. Fauci has been awarded the National Medal of Science (2005), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2008), and the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). He has also received 58 honorary degrees from universities domestically and across the world.

Fauci will join Cullen Murphy ’74 H’19, former managing editor of The Atlantic, in Johnson Chapel on Sunday, March 2 at 12 p.m. Further seating will be available in Lipton Lecture Hall; the event will be livestreamed.