2025 McCreight Lecture in the Humanities: Viet Thanh Nguyen

This fall, the Council is proud to host novelist and Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen as this year’s McCreight Lecturer on Thursday, October 23, 2025.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other honors include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction from the American Library Association, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, a Gold Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and the Asian/Pacific American Literature Award from the Asian/Pacific American Librarian Association. His other books are Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction) and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.

He is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He has been interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Seth Meyers, and Terry Gross, among many others. He is also the author of the bestselling short story collection, The Refugees. Most recently he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and le Prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book in France), for The Sympathizer. He is the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and the Library of America volume for Maxine Hong Kingston. He co-authored Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book, with his then six-year-old son, Ellison, and his most recent novel is The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer. HBO turned The Sympathizer into a TV series in 2024, directed by Park Chan-wook. Nguyen’s last book was Simone, a children’s book illustrated by Minnie Phan, while his new book is To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, published by Harvard University Press in 2025.

Admission is free, no RSVP required. Select Viet Thanh Nguyen titles will be sold at the door courtesy of Taylor Books of Charleston.

West Virginia Humanities Council: wvhumanities.org

For more information on Viet Thanh Nguyen, please visit: vietnguyen.info