Wilkes Announces 2026 Allan Hamilton Dickson Spring Writers Series

The Wilkes University English Department will proudly host its annual Allan Hamilton Spring Writers Series. The series features writers and scholars from across all genres and backgrounds, as they come to campus to present readings from their works and participate in question-and-answer sessions with the audience.

The series opens on Wednesday, Feb. 25, with Brooklyn-based poet and educator Brionne Janae. Janae is the author of three poetry collections, including their most recent collection, Because You Were Mine, which was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. A previous collection, Blessed Are the Peacemakers, was the recipient of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. Janae was a 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and is an alumna of the literary nonprofit Hedgebrook.

Next up, on Wednesday, March 25, is internationally-renowned fiction author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Adjei-Brenyah was raised in Spring Valley, New York, and now lives in the Bronx. His debut collection, Friday Black, was a New York Times bestseller, won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His first novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, winner of the Inside Literary Prize, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Books Are My Bag Awards, and selected as a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year. Adjei-Brenyah is a National Book Foundation’s ‘5 Under 35’ honoree.

The series concludes with Digital Humanities and Early American Literature Scholar Lauren Klein on Tuesday, April 14. Klein is a professor of data & decision sciences and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab and the Atlanta Interdisciplinary AI Network. Her research brings together computational and critical methods to explore questions of gender, race and justice, both in early America and today. Klein is the author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of the award-winning Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020) and the editor (with Matthew K. Gold) of Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), among other books and papers. Her next book, Data by Design: From the History of Visualization to the Future We Need, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in fall 2026.

All events are free and open to the public. For more information, visit wilkes.edu/dickson.