Amor Towles, bestselling author, will deliver the annual Wilkes University Max Rosenn Lecture in Law and Humanities at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 15, 2026, at the newly-renovated Dorothy Dickson Darte Center for the Performing Arts, 239 South River St., Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Towles’s award-winning novels have collectively sold more than eight million copies and have been translated into more than forty languages. His newest book, Table for Two (2024), was an immediate bestseller and called “a winner” by the New York Times. Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), was also a New York Times bestseller and was named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) was named one of the best books of 2016 by numerous outlets, including the Washington Post and NPR.
Debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, his third novel, The Lincoln Highway, was one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2021, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021 and was #1 on Amazon’s list of the Best Books of the Year. It will be made into a movie adapted and directed by Christopher Storer for Warner Brothers.
David Hicks, PhD, director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University, will moderate a conversation with Towles. Hicks, a first-generation college student, earned his doctorate in American Literature at NYU and taught at Pace University in New York as well as Regis University in Denver, where he co-founded and co-directed the MFA in Creative Writing.
In his forties he shifted his work from academic to creative, first publishing short stories, then collecting and rearranging them as a novel-in-stories, White Plains, published by Conundrum Press (now Bower House Books) in 2017. White Plains was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, Arapahoe Libraries 2018 “Village Read,” and Westword Magazine’s #1 book by Colorado authors. His children’s book, The Magic Ticket, was published in 2024 and his second novel, The Gospel According to Danny, was published 2025.
The Rosenn Lecture is free and open to the public, though registration is required.
A book signing in the lobby of the Darte Center will follow the main presentation. Books will be available for purchase the day of the event.
For more information and online registration, visit wilkes.edu/rosenn.