Yale University President Peter Salovey presents the 2023 awards in drama, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and legendary music critic Greil Marcus delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write.”
Marcus will be introduced by Daphne Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale.
The lecture will also be livestreamed on the Windham-Campbell YouTube channel.

This exhibit celebrates the Elizabethan Club’s rare book collections, largely assembled in the early 1910s by a young Yale alumnus who was inspired by his Shakespeare lectures. The exhibit constellates around the 1623 First Folio but tells a broader story, foregrounding early modern printers, 20th-century bibliographers, and booksellers today. We’ll see how the First Folio established Shakespeare’s iconic status.

“I Give These Books: The History of Yale University Library, 1656-2022”, presents a comprehensive history of one of America’s oldest university libraries from its founding through the present day. The library began with books brought over from Europe and England by Puritans seeking to found their own colony, and grew through donations from overseas donors, personal libraries of faculty members, and alumni endowments.

An entirely new version of the comedy directed and abridged by Laura Engel.

The Play:

In 1801 Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Agnes Berry embarked on a remarkable collaboration staging a performance of Berry’s comedy Fashionable Friends as an amateur theatrical production at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Damer and Berry starred in the play as the titular fashionable friends; Damer played the seductive and sly Lady Selina and Berry the sentimental and clever Mrs. Lovell.

The 1962 book “The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things” radically altered how we now think about the history of art. Studying and traveling through Latin America, the author George Kubler (1912–1996) developed a methodology that would expand the scope of art history—moving it away from the study of great works of art and biographies of makers toward a consideration of every intentionally made object.