Novelist Sanjena Sathian, Mercer's 2025 Ferrol A. Sams Distinguished Chair of English, will read from her fiction on January 23. Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.…

The 2025 Laurie Byington Lecture Series speaker John Blake will give his lecture, "The Power of a Hopeless Cause," on Thursday, Jan. 23 at 6 p.m. in the Presidents Dining Room. Blake is an award-winning author and senior writer at CNN.com. His memoir is "More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the…