The 49th Annual Old Dominion University Literary Festival, “Make Room for Wonder,” will run October 4-8, 2026, on campus and at other Norfolk locations. Co-directed by John McManus and Michael Weber of the Old Dominion University Department of English, the festival — thought to be the longest-running of its kind in the United States — will feature readings, workshops, a curator’s tour, a film screening, an anthology launch and a game jam. 

Headliners include MacArthur Fellow Hanif Abdurraqib, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for “There’s Always This Year” and the 2026 Weston International Award for career achievement in literary nonfiction. Abdurraqib is the M.F.A. Creative Writing Program’s Fall 2026 Edith and Forrest P. White Writer in Residence. 

Scott McClanahan, author of “Crapalachia” and “The Sarah Book,” will read from “Fights!,” his first novel in eight years, published in July by Rose Books and excerpted in The Paris Review. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, whose novel “Big Girl” was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and whose story collection “Blue Talk and Love” won the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary, will lead a conversation on craft and give the festival’s closing reading. 

Chris Adrian, author of “The Children’s Hospital” and “The Great Night,” earned his medical degree in 2001 from Eastern Virginia Medical School, part of Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at Old Dominion University. Now a practicing physician as well as an acclaimed author, Adrian will return to campus to read at Lester Hall and lead a workshop on narrative medicine at Waitzer Hall. Adrian, a Guggenheim Fellow and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40,” is a practicing physician who trained in pediatric hematology and oncology. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and “The Best American Short Stories.” 

Siobhan Fallon’s story collection “You Know When the Men Are Gone,” winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction, follows the wives of soldiers at Fort Hood through their husbands’ deployments. Fallon, an Army spouse, will read at The Slover Library in downtown Norfolk. 

Three poets featured in the Virginia Poets Database — the archive of Virginia poets created by Professor Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of Virginia — will read at the University’s Perry Library, which turns 50 this year: Lesley Wheeler, poetry editor of “Shenandoah;” Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda, Poet Laureate of Virginia 2006-2008; and Luz Schweig, editor of the anthology “Somos Xicanas.” Igloria will also teach a workshop in Coptic bookbinding. 

The Baron and Ellin Gordon Art Galleries will host a curator’s tour of the exhibition “Bread + Puppet Theater: Sculpture in Action” with Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth, the galleries’ director and curator. Naro Video @ ODU Libraries will screen “Once” at The Slover Library. In “Room to Wonder,” a literary-themed game jam hosted by the Monarch Institute for Game Design and Development, participants have two weeks to design story-based games that correspond to the festival’s theme. 

 Perry Library will host a launch party for two anthologies, “Brackish Waters” and “Constellate.” 

Additional writers include M.F.A. faculty members Jane Alberdeston and Julia Johnson; professors emeriti Joe Jackson, whose “Splendid Liberators” was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux last October, and Michael Patrick Pearson; Hampton Roads writers Nicole Glover and Kimbra Drake; and M.F.A. alumni Emma Comery, Bob Kunzinger, Richard Leise, and Caleb True. 

To see the full festival schedule, including presenter bios and parking information, visit the Literary Festival website. 

All events are free and open to the public. 

Follow the festival on Facebook at ODU Literary Festival and on Instagram @olddominionmfa. 

Follow @oduarts on Facebook and Instagram for updates on public programming. 

Co-directors’ statement: 

We read because we wonder about ourselves: who would I have been in that body, that country, that century, and what would I have done when the soldiers came, or the diagnosis, or the flood. Wonder is also the astonishment when a book answers. This festival has been making room for both since 1978, when it began as an Arts Reunion built on the premise that “every person is potentially an artist.” Forty-eight years later the premise holds. 

The theme is drawn from a line in “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” the poem by University alumna Renée Good (1988–2026) that won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize at Old Dominion University. We dedicate the 49th Annual Literary Festival to her memory. 

Join us October 4-8 for five days of readings and conversation, free and open, everyone welcome. 

— John McManus and Michael Weber, Old Dominion University Department of English