Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and has been published in a dozen countries. Her journalism and essays have recently appeared in The Best American Food Writing, and in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times magazines. She also writes for film and TV. She lives in Los Angeles. What a Time to Be Alive is out in Fall 2026 from Ecco.

Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021) and Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017), as well as of the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2022).  Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is the Lincoln Excellence for Assistant Professors (LEAP) Scholar.

The Third Thursday Literary Series is sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, Department of English, and Southern Humanities Review in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University; the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University; and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Refreshments will be available at 6 PM; the reading will begin at 6:30 PM. Book sales are provided by Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers.