Situated in both the Department of English and the Département des littératures de langue française, de traduction et de création (DLTC) within the Faculty of Arts, the Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence Program brings a creative writer to the Department of English for one semester each year. By providing valuable insight into the creative process through events, student meetings, and workshops, the Richler WiR nurtures emerging student talent. Students take in practical and theoretical approaches to writing for such media as television, film, radio, stage, interactive media and print publications.
Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence 2025-2026
Ricardo Wilson
17 February 2026: Reading of new work by Ricardo Wilson - 5:30 pm
24 March 2026: Book Launch for Troubled Lands (Princeton UP, 2026) edited by Ricardo Wilson, 5pm
Locations TBA
Ricardo Wilson, a creative writer and scholar, is an associate professor of English at Williams College and the founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation, a residency and arts advocacy organization for writers of color from the United States and Latin America. He has, most recently, extracted from the archive and edited Troubled Lands, a forthcoming and previously unpublished collection of short fiction from Mexico and Cuba translated by Langston Hughes in 1935 (Princeton University Press) and is the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories (PANK Books) and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness (Northwestern University Press). An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories was selected as a finalist for both the Vermont Book Award and the Big Other Book Award. His writing can also be found in, among other spaces, 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, BOMB, Callaloo, The Common, CR: The New Centennial Review, swamp pink, Northwest Review, The Offing, and Stirring. He is at work on his forthcoming novel Even Worse than the Nightmare.