University of Utah's Guest Writers Series Presents the Agha Shahid Ali Prize Reading

Caleb Nolen reads at the Finch Lane Art Gallery at the Art Barn on Thursday, November 5, as part of the University of Utah's Guest Writers Series. He's coming in as the winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, which he took home in 2025 for his debut collection, Afterlight. He'll be sharing the bill with poet Jennifer Chang, so it's two voices on one night.

Nolen earned his MFA from the University of Virginia, and his poems have appeared in journals like Fence and The Georgia Review. Afterlight is the book that won him the prize, and that's the work that brings him to Salt Lake City. The Agha Shahid Ali Prize is the center of the evening, and Nolen is the one who won it.

Jennifer Chang joins him on the program. Her book An Authentic Life won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches at the University of Texas in Austin and has received the William Carlos Williams Award and fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. Between the two of them, there's a good deal of recognized work to hear in one sitting.

The Guest Writers Series is run by the University of Utah, which brings distinguished authors to Salt Lake City to foster dialogue between writers and their audience. The reading starts at 7 PM at the Finch Lane Art Gallery at the Art Barn, and it's free and open to the public.