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Join us Thursday, October 22, at 8 pm, for the 56th annual Steloff Lecture delivered by novelist Garth Greenwell. Greenwell will lecture, respond to audience questions, and be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters.
The Steloff Lecture is presented by the English Department at Skidmore College and is free and open to the public.
About Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of three books of fiction, most recently Small Rain, which won the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2025 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first novel, What Belongs to You, won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was long-listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second book, Cleanness, was a New York Times Notable Book and was nominated for several awards, including the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and France’s Prix Sade. It was named a Best Book of 2020 by The New Yorker, Time, The Washington Post, and over thirty other publications. His books have been translated into more than fifteen languages.
With R. O. Kwon, Greenwell co-edited the anthology Kink: Stories, a New York Times Notable Book and National Bestseller. With Idra Novey, he is the co-translator of Luis Muñoz’s One Moment, published by Washington Square Press in 2026.
Greenwell’s short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. His writing on literature, art, and music appears widely, including in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Yale Review, and elsewhere; he also writes the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. A collection of his essays is forthcoming.
He has taught at Princeton University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Grinnell College, and the University of Mississippi, where he was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence. Most recently, he spent three years as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the graduate creative writing program at New York University. He frequently offers classes on close reading and craft online.
Greenwell was a student at the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore for six years and later taught fiction at the Institute for five summers. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Vursell Award for exceptional prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in Iowa City.
About the Steloff Lecture
Skidmore’s annual Frances Steloff Lecture honors the work of a major literary figure. The Steloff Lecture series was established at Skidmore in 1967 by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs, a well-known patron of writers, and founder of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. She endowed the lecture series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Notable Steloff speakers have included five Nobel Prize winners and dozens of the world’s most important writers. Previous Steloff honorees include Mario Vargas Llosa, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J. M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson, John Banville, and Joyce Carol Oates, among many others.