Hope in unsettling times—Novelist Ayana Mathis reflects on literature, hope, and justice at Junior Parents Weekend

Hope in unsettling times

Novelist Ayana Mathis reflects on literature, hope, and justice at Junior Parents Weekend

March 18, 2026

Acclaimed novelist Ayana Mathis began her Junior Parents Weekend Lecture at the Institute for Social Concerns with a startling admission.

“I am,” she stated, “in the midst of a crisis of faith.”

Ayana Mathis speaks in Andrews Auditorium at Geddes Hall — *Ayana Mathis speaks in Andrews Auditorium for Junior Parents Weekend*

For Mathis, this crisis of faith isn’t about the existence of God. It’s about the power of literature.

In recent years, with the weight of injustice and grief bearing down, Mathis explained, “I find myself at my own desk wondering if there’s any point. Should I have been an EMT or an immigration lawyer?”

In a captivating lecture examining the role of novelists, Mathis argued that literature can offer hope in unsettling times. It does so not by projecting certainty about the future but by providing readers a “robust moral imagination” that allows them to hope for and act toward a future that is possible, even if there are no assurances that it will, indeed, come to pass.

“Mathis gave a stunning testament to the place of literature in the pursuit of justice,” said Suzanne Shanahan, the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the institute. “We need practitioners to work toward building a more just society, but we also need prophets who imagine the world we seek to build. Novelists like Mathis provide that vision.”

A crisis of hope

Mathis is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Unsettled, the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Gabe Hudson Prize. Her work has been supported by notable grants and fellowships, including the 2024–25 American Academy in Berlin Prize. She was the first African-American woman to serve as assistant professor for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and currently teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City.

*Parents and grandparents join Notre Dame students for Mathis’s lecture*

Yet she told a spellbound audience that she is struggling with her relationship to her work. When such a crisis of faith occurs, her mind naturally turns to hope. But she is finding the common understanding of hope as optimism to be “not robust enough to meet the moment’s trials and demands.”

Mathis turned to her novel The Unsettled to reimagine hope. The book tells of a mother and son, Ava and Toussaint, who are living in a homeless shelter in Philadelphia but are drawn toward communities promising the possibility of a different future. These communities are objects of hope in the novel, but Mathis is cognizant that nearly every Black settlement erected in the years after Reconstruction was eventually abandoned or destroyed during Jim Crow. This realization led Mathis to ask, “Is hope only real if we know that we will achieve what we set out to do and do in fact achieve it?”

Bringing hope to eye-level

Because literature is “deeply and always experiential,” it is able to bring lofty ideas like hope “down to eye level,” Mathis suggested, “down to the level of a parent’s love for their child.”

Mathis brought her point home by directly addressing the parents in the room.

“It’s Junior Parents Weekend,” she said. “All you parents sitting here have hoped for your children beyond what you can express. You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know where they will go or who they will become, but the hope is there, more deeply than you can express. There are precedents in human experience for hope that is hard.”

*Mathis signs copies of her novels in the Geddes Hall Coffee House following her address*

Mathis described her newfound understanding of hope as a vision of the imaginative possibilities of the now that does not promise to remove all doubts, fears, and vulnerabilities. Instead, these are part of “the web of uncertainties that make real hope possible.” In place of optimism about a certain future, “we are better served,” Mathis stated, “by the precarities of the now.”

To coincide with Mathis’s lecture, the institute provided a copy of The Unsettled to each junior involved in the institute’s programs in the hope that it will expand their moral imaginations as they pursue the work of justice in their various vocations.

“I was so inspired by the way Mathis beautifully articulated how we can actualize hope in our daily lives,” said Ashley McDonnell ’26, who attended the lecture with her mother. “What moved me most was her example of how we rock, feed, and love a baby without knowing who they will become. We don’t withdraw care because the future is uncertain, but we choose to hope that they will turn into an accomplished and loving individual.”

The annual Junior Parents Weekend Lecture brings a prominent public figure to campus for a lecture for Notre Dame juniors and their parents. Previous speakers have included Eliza Griswold, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Liz Bruenig.

All photos by Peter Ringenberg for the University of Notre Dame.