Junior Parents Weekend Lecture Series
Previous Junior Parents Weekend Lectures
The annual Junior Parents Weekend Lecture brings a prominent public figure to campus for a lecture for Notre Dame juniors and their parents. Each lecture includes a Q&A time along with a reception and book signing.
2026 | Ayana Mathis
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and most recently, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Gabe Hudson Prize. The book was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. The New York Times calls it, “Poignant, heartbreaking,” while The Minneapolis Star Tribune describes it as, “An ardent, ambitious, and carefully stitched tapestry of a novel, one that deserves and rewards our attention.”
Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was a New York Times Bestseller, the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s essays and criticism have been published in the The New York Times, The Atlantic, T Magazine, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. Currently pursuing her Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary, Mathis’s most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five-part New York Times essay series Imprinted By Belief.
Mathis is a finalist for the 2025 Dos Passos Prize and a 2025—26 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2024-25 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program. She currently teaches at Hunter College in the MFA Program.
Date: February 20, 2026
Time: 5:00—6:00 pm
Location: Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium
Plan to attend!
2025 | Circle of Hope with Eliza Griswold
Pulitzer Prize-winner Eliza Griswold is a journalist, poet and translator. Writing “with a reporter’s shrewdness and a poet’s grace” (Princeton Humanities Council), her work centers on the complex nexus of religion, politics, human rights, and the environment. Director of Princeton University’s vaunted Program in Journalism, Griswold has been a contributing writer for The New Yorker for over two decades and has written and translated several volumes of poetry.
Her newest book, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award, provides a timely reflection on a growing pattern of fracture and polarization across foundational American institutions. An intimate chronicle of a close-knit church in Philadelphia as it dissolves amidst idealistic crises, it traces the drift away from traditional organized religion and churchgoing in the wake of modern society’s increasingly divergent belief systems.
Deeply committed to journalism’s role in sustaining a healthy democracy, Griswold has been hailed for humanizing divisive social and political issues through compassionate portrayals of the people and communities most affected. Her exacting and immersive journalism teases out the stories behind fraying institutions and communities, offering us urgently needed perspectives on a rapidly evolving world—one of ever greater divides—between the have and have nots, rural and urban disparities, the perception of environmental issues, shifting political identities, and the sea-changes within contemporary faith and spiritual communities.
2024 | Poverty and Beloved Community with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a spiritual writer, preacher, and community-cultivator. He serves as Assistant Director for Partnerships and Fellowships at Yale University’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy.
Jonathan is a leader in the Red Letter Christian movement and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He speaks often about spirituality and faith in public life to churches and conferences across the denominational spectrum and has given lectures at dozens of universities and seminaries.
2023 | A Conversation with Liz Bruenig
Liz Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Bruenig has traveled across the United States covering the experiences of those sentenced to death in the prison system and discussed the problems of execution and the rights of incarcerated people.