College of Humanities » Tanner Humanities Center

A comprehensive symposium dedicated to preserving the vital waterways that sustain life, health, and prosperity throughout Utah. 

Water narratives from acclaimed voices including Lisa Bickmore, Utah’s poet laureate; nan seymour, prominent Great Salt Lake advocate; Paisley Rekdal, Director of the University of Utah American West Center; and Leia Larsen, water and land use reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune. Researchers will present scholarship and advocacy work, including Jack Schmidt from Utah State University, Greg Smoak from the University of Utah, and Daniel Hernandez from Utah Valley University. 

The symposium will conclude with an exclusive screening of Wild Hope: The Shoshone Nation's Quest to Reclaim Bear River, followed by a discussion with Brad Parry, Tribal Council Vice Chairman for Natural Resources, Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. Local artists will also have artwork on display.  

This initiative connects regional water scholars, environmental stewards, and artists while fostering networks for future conservation and sustainability efforts. 

Daniel Mendelsohn will discuss his acclaimed new translation of Homer’s Odyssey, published in April 2025 by the University of Chicago Press. His talk will be followed by a conversation with Scott Black, Professor of English and Director of the Tanner Humanities Center. 

A book-signing with The King’s English Bookshop will follow the event. 

Mendelsohn is Editor-at-large of The New York Review of Books, and author of several influential works, including Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones (2019) and Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate (2020). His essays and reviews have appeared widely, including in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New York Times. In 2025, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recognizing his significant contributions to literature and criticism.

Jesmyn Ward, celebrated as “the heir apparent to Toni Morrison” (LitHub) and one of the most acclaimed novelists of her generation, will deliver the 2025 David P. Gardner Graduate Lecture in the Humanities and Fine Arts. 

Book signing to follow, with sales by The King’s English Bookshop

Ward is the author of Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), both winners of the National Book Award, as well as editor of the influential anthology, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race (2016). Her work explores the rural South, race, environmental justice, and historical memory.

Her most recent novel, Let Us Descend (2023), an Oprah Book Club pick, was named one of the year’s best books by The Washington Post, Time, The New Yorker, and others. The title, drawn from Dante’s Inferno, reflects the novel’s engagement with history and spirit. NPR described it as “the literary equivalent of an open wound from which poetry pours.”

Ward is professor of English and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Tulane University. 

The David P. Gardner Graduate Lecture in the Humanities and Fine Arts is administered by the Tanner Humanities Center in collaboration with the College of Humanities and the College of Fine Arts. The Gardner Lecture was founded in the University of Utah Graduate School in honor of former President David Pierpont Gardner. The Gardner Lecture features distinguished scholars and artists from the humanities and the fine arts in alternating years. The lectureship is funded by the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

The Utah Center for the Book at Utah Humanities and the Tanner Humanities Center are hosting a reading by University of Utah writers who have been honored by the Utah Book Awards for 2025.

Free and open to the public. Limited seating. Ticket reservations strongly recommended.

Writers who will be reading from their celebrated works:

Paisley Rekdal, author of West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press) — Winner, 2025 Utah Book Award for Poetry
An unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays drawing a powerful connection between the railroad's completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Winner, 2024 Kingsley Tufts Award; longlist, 2023 National Book Award. Rekdal is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing and director of the American West Center.

Lindsey Drager, author of The Avian Hourglass (Dzanc Books) — Finalist, 2025 Utah Book Award for Speculative Fiction
A reflection on the intersecting crises of mental health, the climate emergency, political polarization, and the exponentially growing reliance on technology. Drager is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Susan J. Sample, author of Trapped in the Bone-House (Main Street Rag Publishing Company) — Finalist, 2025 Utah Book Award for Poetry
A personal elegy with a medical researcher's knowledge of how we care for the sick and dying. Susan J. Sample is Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, and Writer-in-Residence at the Huntsman Cancer Institute.

Lindsey Webb, author of Plat (Archway Editions) — Notable Read, 2025 Utah Book Award for Poetry
A vivid and haunting elegy reflecting on Mormonism, suicide, and gender in the American West. Webb earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Utah in 2025 and is now Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Grinnell College.

The Utah Book Awards are a project of The Utah Center for the Book at Utah Humanities (an affiliate of The Library of Congress Center), the Utah Division of Arts & Museums, the Utah State Library Division, and The League of Utah Writers.

The Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah supports academic research, public engagement, and educational programming in the humanities. Views expressed in events and programming do not represent the official views of the Center or University.

Cindi Textor, Associate Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Utah, will give a public talk this spring drawing from her research on transnational Japan. Her scholarship examines Japan not as an isolated culture, but as a site where ideas and empires meet, focusing especially on the enduring legacies of Japanese imperialism and its intersections with American and other western empires. Her first book, Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility (University of California Press, 2024), analyzes moments of incoherence and unintelligibility in the work of Koreans in Japan, challenging conventional approaches to literary representation.

She is now at work on a second book that explores how modern Japan has engaged with and reconfigured white supremacist ideology, often through processes of translation. This new project argues that, even in a population largely considered non-white, white supremacy can operate and thrive when whiteness is ambiguous or provisional.

The Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah supports academic research, public engagement, and educational programming in the humanities. Views expressed in events and programming do not represent the official views of the Center or University.