Award-winning poet Samyak Shertok to speak at ATU Wednesday

RUSSELLVILLE — Samyak Shertok, winner of the 2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, will be the spring 2025 speaker for the Arkansas Tech University Visiting Authors Series.

Shertok will speak at 6 p.m. Wednesday in Ross Pendergraft Library and Technology Center room 300B on the Russellville campus. He will read from his collection “No Rhododendron.”

Admission will be free and open to the public. The program is co-hosted by ATU’s Nebo literary magazine and the Department of English and World Languages, according to a press release from the university.

Shertok is originally from Nepal. He was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University and is a faculty member at Hendrix College, where he serves as assistant professor of creative writing, the release states.

A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Jake Adam York Prize, Shertok has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Shertok has earned the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, according to the release.