News and Events

ENWL Calendar of Events, Fall 2026

August 27—Books of the Living Dead!

True Story Brewing Company, Birmingham AL 7pm-10pm

Join Professor Rozelle and others for a night of live author readings at True Story Brewing in Birmingham. Rozelle will read new material about a man in a Walmart parking lot with a commemorative coin inside his body cavity.

September 1—Release Party for The Tower

Farmer Hall 5-6pm

Join us to celebrate the release of the new issue of The Tower, UM’s premiere literary and arts magazine! Enjoy pizza, mingle with authors. listen (or read!) at the open mic, and pick up your free issue of The Tower.

September 21—BACHE Visiting Writer’s Series: Kwoya Fagin Maples

J.A. Brown Room, Carmichael Library 3:30pm-5pm

Kwoya Fagin Maples is a writer, poet, and woodworker from Charleston, SC. She is the author of the poetry collections Long Eye (Hub City Press, 2026) and Mend (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) and the co-editor of I Witness: Documentary, Witness, and Research-based Poetics, forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and now teaches in their MFA program.

Maples’ debut collection, Mend, tells the story of the birth of obstetrics and gynecology in America and the role Black enslaved women played in that process. Mend received a 2019 Hurston/Wright Legacy Finalist Award for Poetry. Her latest book, Long Eye, channels the mythic, defiant voice of a Black mermaid to explore the intersections of science, poetry, and mythology. Inspired by Mami Wata, a water spirit of West African folklore, Maples explores her identity as a neurodivergent Black woman, a mother, a thinker, a protector, and a creator with ties to the Atlantic waters of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

October 13—Memoirist Ly Tran

Pat Scales Special Collections Room, Carmichael Library 2-3:15pm

Ly Tran is the author of House of Sticks, a critically acclaimed memoir detailing her immigrant experience as she and her family emigrate from Vietnam to America in the 1990s through a US government program that helped resettle Vietnamese POWs in America. From child sweatshop labor to working in nail salons throughout Brooklyn to dropping out of college, Ly tells her story of what it was like to be a Vietnamese immigrant living in New York City.

One of Vogue and NPR’s Best Books of the Year

October 20—Poetry@UM: Poet and Songwriter Lee Bains

J.A. Brown Room, Carmichael Library 3:30pm

Lee Bains is author of Work Lunch (Hub City Press, 2026) and lead vocalist of Southern alternative rock band Lee Bains and the Glory Fires. Bains’s four albums center what Rolling Stone once called “Southern gospel punk.” In Work Lunch, his poems explore the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of Southern culture and values through the lens of food, whether at a meat-and-three or a taquería. In sprawling, long-form poems, Bains mines subjects of family, the often-invisible work of service, and the horrors and comforts of fast food chains.

“Work Lunch makes clear that Bains’s words, which have often been jammed tight into punk rock’s pelting cadence, deserve space and grace.” —The Bitter Southerner

October 28—Film Screening: Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)

Humanities Hall Auditorium, 5:30pm-7pm

For Day of the Dead (and Halloween, too) WL and the SPN 570 class will present the Mexican film Macario (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960).  The film is based on the novella of the same title by B. Traven and is set during the Day of the Dead festival in central Mexico during colonial times.  A very entertaining movie with lots of Day of the Dead references and a rather dark fairy tale feel.  Run time is 90 minutes.  In Spanish with English subtitles.  Pan de Muerto (Bread of the Dead) from a local bakery will be served before the movie outside the auditorium.

October 29 – Halloween Scary Poetry Reading

English Lounge (2^nd Floor Humanities), 12:30-1:45pm

Join students from Dr. Murphy’s poetry seminar for an afternoon of spooky verses, tricks, and treats.