Each year the English program hosts several guest readers or speakers. Past visitors have included poet Robert Pinsky (right) and Southern fiction-writer Lee Smith pictured below.

Other distinguished literary visitors to come to Centre in recent years include (to name only a few) renowned poets Robert Hass, Charles Wright, Heather McHugh, and John Hollander, Irish writers Ciaran Carson, Medbh McGuckian, and Nuala Ni Dhomnaill, fiction writers Kelly Cherry, Mary Gaitskill, and William Henry Lewis, performance artist Peter Trachtenberg, and such influential literary scholars as Professor Jill Mann of Cambridge University and the University of Notre Dame and Professor Weldon Thornton of the University of North Carolina.

In fall 2005 the tradition of powerhouse guest speakers will continue when poet Jay Wright, winner of the 2005 Bollingen prize for American Poetry, comes to campus to read from his work and meet with students, followed by Edward P. Jones, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer prize for fiction for his novel, The Known World.