LIT Sunday: Author Readings

This year’s author lineup offers a vibrant spectrum of voices—memoirists, poets, novelists, and screenwriters—who will each read an 8-minute segment from their latest writing! Before they draw you into the world’s they’ve created on the written page each writer will share a quick story about their first concert or most memorable concert experience. It’s a new addition, and we think you’re really gonna dig it. Curated and hosted by Frayn Masters, this year’s program invites audiences to sit back and let their minds be filled with the imagery and characters of some of today’s most exciting literary voices.

Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer and novelist. A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, Electric Literature, Poets & Writers, Portland Monthly Magazine, and elsewhere. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View.

Bankole’s debut novel, The Edge of Water, set between Nigeria and New Orleans, was published in February 2025 and named A Best Book at various outlets, including Oprah Daily, Ms. Magazine, Apple Books, Book Riot, The Root, Electric Literature, and more. Most recently, The Edge of Water was finalist for the Westport Prize for Literature.

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