By NALINI JONES
This piece is excerpted from the novel The Unbroken Coast by Nalini Jones, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
This piece is excerpted from the novel We Were Pretending by Hannah Gersen, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
By CLAIRE JIA
This piece is excerpted from the novel Wanting by Claire Jia, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
This piece is excerpted from the short story collection Where to Carry the Sound by Nina Sudhakar, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
With guest talks from physician Dr. Anthony Fauci and actor Jeffrey Wright, student and alumni readings, and a birthday party for The Common, this year’s 10th-anniversary LitFest was a celebratory occasion. From February 28 to March 2, 2025, attendees flocked to sold-out events in Amherst College’s Johnson Chapel, went behind the scenes with award-winning writers like Percival Everett, read poetry in the shadow of Emily Dickinson’s house, and celebrated the life and legacy of Amherst’s literary community.
Read on for a gallery of selected images and videos from LitFest 2025, and view all the event recordings here.
This piece is excerpted from On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Dr. Anthony Fauci, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
This piece is excerpted from The Math of Saint Felix, a poetry collection by Diane Exavier ’09. Exavier will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
algebra
By SARAH SAWYER
This piece is excerpted from The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer ’97, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
Austin, Texas
1987
A girl leans on a metal guardrail at the edge of a brown field. She will not stand here again. She knows this, so she is trying to notice everything: the tall stalks of grass turning into thick stitches of coral and gold, the sun a dark orange marble rolling past the clouds. When she looks down, she sees her toes curling in the gravel, the dents from the hot guardrail burning the soft undersides of her forearms.
If she stays here, facing the field, she can’t see the bulldozers, perched like yellow vultures in the cul-de-sac behind her.
These piece is excerpted from a memoir-cookbook entitled Group Living and Other Recipes by Lola Milholland ’07, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.
When I visit my mom in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, we bike together. She’ll pull out the old road bike her brother Paul built from parts when he lived with us in Portland. It’s in the shed that sits between her little year-round greenhouse and the outhouse that serves as the only loo on the property. We cycle up her one-mile gravel driveway, out to roads that twist and turn through hilly farmland, past Amish kids in overalls and sturdy full-length dresses working with horses and hanging up laundry. From the ridgetops, the hills in every direction look like bubbles on pizza dough.
In the fall, the hillsides change color every day. The basswood leaves turn a daisy yellow, and the oak leaves become the orange-red of a Firecracker ice pop. The Amish on Wolf Valley Road will be harvesting corn. Their two-horse team pulls a metal scythe through the stalks, leaving behind a flat field of roughage like a pile of cut hair.
By BRANDON SOM
This piece is excerpted from Brandon Som’s Tripas, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Som will be a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025, an exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life. Register here.
ANTENNA
Tuning not lute but car radio, Cocteau’s Orpheus copies the
broadcasts from a netherworld for verses—
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