2026 Annual McKinney Contest Guest Speaker: Hisham Matar

Hisham Matar is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three novels and two works of memoir. His novels include In the Country of Men (2008), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and won numerous international prizes, Anatomy of a Disappearance (2011), named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and the Chicago Tribune, and My Friends (2024), a novel about exile, friendship, and family, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell prize for Political Fiction, was shortlisted for the National Book Award, and was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. Matar’s memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His second memoir, A Month in Siena (2019), offers a meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape and shed further light on the present world around us. Matar is a professor at Barnard College and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. He lives in London and New York.

EVENTS

Annual Writing Contest Award Ceremony and Keynote Speaker 
April 9th, 2026
7-9 PM  
Heffner Alumni House

Past Events

• 2025: Lan Samantha Chang
• 2024: Tracy K. Smith
• 2023: Gish Jen
• 2022: Colson Whitehead
• 2021 (Virtual): Amina Gautier, Molly McCully Brown, and Susan Nguyen.