April Bernard, Amy Hempel, and Katy Simpson Smith

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC AND AVAILABLE TO STREAM | April Bernard, Amy Hempel, and Katy Simpson Smith will read as part of the Writers Reading series.

April has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whitney Humanities Center Fellowship, and the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her essays appear in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books and Book Post. Her sixth book of poems, The World Behind the World, has just been published by W.W. Norton.

Amy is the award-winning author of Reasons to Live, At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, Tumble Home, and The Dog of the Marriage. She was awarded the Yaddo Artist Medal in 2018.

Katy was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea, Free Men, and The Everlasting, a New York Times Best Historical Fiction Book of 2020. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in New Orleans.