The Hemingway Center Reading Series announced their line-up of visiting writers for Fall 2025. Each writer will give a reading of their work, followed by a book sale and signing.
Each semester, the The Hemingway Center Reading Series brings acclaimed poets and fiction writers to campus. The visiting writers give readings, sign books, and meet with Boise State creative writing MFA students. Free and open to the public, all the readings take place in the historic Hemingway Center on campus.
Event Details
Diane Raptosh – Friday, Sept. 5, 2025
“[Raptosh] has the control of a skilled conductor, steering her trains of thought through sharp turns of phrase and multi-layered emotional terrain.” — Joey Nicoletti
“Diane Raptosh’s poems balance reticence against revelation to create a poetry that is urgent, fresh, and beautiful.” –Alice Fulton
About Diane Raptosh
Diane Raptosh authored nine poetry collections, including “American Amnesiac” (Etruscan Press), longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. She teaches literature and creative writing at the College of Idaho. Her ninth poetry collection, “I Eric America,”released in fall 2024 (Etruscan Press). www.dianeraptosh.com
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Robyn Schiff – Friday, Sept. 26, 2025
“If you read only one poetry collection this year […] make it Robyn Schiff’s “Information Desk: An Epic.”
– The New York Times
“Not many books, let alone book-length poems, are as can’t-put-it-down propulsive as Robyn Schiff’s fourth book, ”Information Desk: An Epic.” […] Readers of all kinds will be overwhelmed by this book’s wonders.”
-The LA Review of Books
“Schiff’s poems, with their Hitchcock-like distrust of appearances, their alertness to hidden binds and snares, offer something few poets ever discover: a vision of the whole world […] Without showiness, Schiff’s poems investigate the reality of their own harrowing visions. […] In poems that take superstition utterly seriously, Schiff can’t keep out of her mind the idea that the poet’s rightful property is her fear of losing everything. ”
-Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
About Robyn Schiff
Robyn Schiff authored four collections of poetry, including the volume “Information Desk: An Epic” (Penguin 2023, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book received the Four Quartets Prize of the Poetry Society of America. A recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Schiff co-edits the independent poetry press Canarium Books and serves as a professor at the University of Chicago, where she also directs the Program in Creative Writing.
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Kristen Arnett and Stephanie Reents – Thursday, October 9
The Hemingway Center Reading Series together with The Cabin present Kristen Arnett , the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, “Mostly Dead Things,” and Stephanie Reents, author of “The Kissing List,” an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review.
Boise State students and faculty may receive a comp ticket by filling out this form.
Non-BSU community members may purchase tickets here.
About Kristen Arnett
Kristen Arnett, a queer Floridian author, published three novels, including “Stop Me If You’ve Heard this One” (Riverhead Books, 2025), longlisted for the Comedy Women in Print Prize; “With Teeth” (Riverhead Books, 2021), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Fiction; and the New York Times bestelling debut “Mostly Dead Things,” also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Arnett runs the substack “Dad Lessons.” Her work appears in The New York Times, TIME, Vogue, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Riverhead Books will publish her upcoming collection of short fiction, “Party at the End of the World.” She holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida.
About Stephanie Reents
Stephanie Reents, authored “The Kissing List,” a collection of stories and an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and “I Meant to Kill Ye,” a biblio-memoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” She will publish her new book, “We Loved to Run,” with Hogarth/Penguin Random House in August 2025. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction.
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Whitney Collins – Thursday, October 16
“Collins exhibits a contagious appreciation for the world’s strange horrors, big and small.”
– Publisher’s Weekly
About Whitney Collins
Whitney Collins authored two story collections: “Ricky and Other Love Stories,” longlisted for The Story Prize, and “Big Bad,” which won the Mary McCarthy Prize, a Gold Medal IPPY, and a Bronze Medal INDIES.
The Best American Short Stories 2022 selected Whitney’s story “Lush” as a Distinguished Story. She also won a Pushcart Prize for “The Entertainer,” a Pushcart Special Mention for “The Pupil,” the American Short(er) Fiction Prize for “Ricky,” and the ProForma Contest for “Cray.”
Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI, The Idaho Review, Gulf Coast, The Pinch, The Los Angeles Review, and swamp pink, among others.
Currently, she is finishing up her third story collection and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing, where she received her MFA.
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Julian T. Brolaski – Friday, October 14, 2025
The Hemingway Center Reading Series and Boise State Creative Writing MFA Program present poet and country musician, Julian T. Brolaski.
“Reading Brolaski is like reading the David Foster Wallace of poetry (or rather, the work of David Foster Wallace’s cooler, less-pretentious sibling)….It’s poetry like you’ve never read poetry before. –Consortium Books
About Julian T. Brolaski
Julian T. Brolaski (it / xe / they), a poet and country musician, authored the collections “Of Mongrelitude” (Wave Books 2017), “Advice for Lovers” (City Lights 2012), and “gowanus atropolis” (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011). Among other honors, Julian served as the 2023–2024 Bagley Wright lecturer, a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellow, and received the 2020 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. You can find its poems in anthologies, including “Queer Nature” (2022), “When the Light of the World was Subdued,” “Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry” (2020) and “We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics” (Nightboat 2020). Julian is currently co-editing an anthology of two-spirit and Indigiqueer poetry with Crisosto Apache, forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2026. With their band Juan & the Pines, Julian released the EP Glittering Forest in 2019; Julian’s full-length album It’s Okay Honey came out in 2023. Julian lives in Goleta, CA.