ENGLISH/CULTURAL CENTER
Presented by Hofstra University’s Department of English in collaboration with the Hofstra Cultural Center.
Launched by Hofstra University in recognition of the importance of writing and literature in a liberal arts education, Great Writers, Great Readings events bring notable authors to campus to meet with creative writing students for a short workshop and question/answer session. Authors may also conduct a reading and book signing that is open to the public. Sometimes the authors use this forum as an opportunity to introduce new unpublished works.
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Fall 2025
22nd Annual Great Writers, Great Readings Series
The following events take place at the Guthart Cultural Center Theater, first floor, Axinn Library, South Campus.
Free and open to the public. Call the Hofstra Cultural Center at 516-463-5669 for more information.
We are pleased to welcome the community, including family members, local schoolchildren, alumni and friends, to athletic and cultural events on campus. All events are free and open to the public. Please register in advance at events.hofstra.edu.
Lynda Barry
Wednesday, October 22, 2025, 4:20-5:30 p.m.
A 2019 MacArthur Fellow and Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Barry has spent her career exploring the power of art across boundaries – between text and image, story and memory, classroom and community. Her books include The Good Times Are Killing me, What It Is, Cruddy, and Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor, invite us to see creativity not as specialized talent, but as a vital capacity. Through her teaching and art, she exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary that is a pillar of astro’s mission Hofstra’s mission. Her visit also resonates perfectly with the theme of this year’s recent presidential symposium, The Beauty of…, as she continually reminds us of how beauty emerges in unexpected forms, from the margins, and through the act of making itself. Lynda Barry has worked as a painter cartoonist writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and has found they are very much alike. The New York Times has subscribed Barry as” among this country’s greatest conjoiners of words and images known for plumbing all kinds of touchy subjects in cartoons, comic strips and novels both graphic and illustrated.”
The Helene Fortunoff Theater, Monroe Lecture Center
California Avenue, South Campus
The dedicated Cultural Center staff is ready to help you engage with diverse artistic and intellectual opportunities that spark new perspectives.