Betsy K. McCreight Lecture in the Humanities
2025 Speaker: 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, at the Capitol Theater in Charleston.
Admission is free, and select Viet Thanh Nguyen titles will be sold at the door courtesy of Taylor Books of Charleston.
The Speaker
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.
For more information on Viet Thanh Nguyen, please visit https://vietnguyen.info
The Venue
The event will be held at the historic Capitol Theater, at 123 Summers Street in the heart of downtown Charleston.
123 Summers Street
Charleston, WV 25301
Click "Capitol Theater" for GoogleMaps
About the McCreight Lecture
The Board of Directors of the West Virginia Humanities Council established the annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities to honor the leadership of Betsy Keadle McCreight, who died in 1985. McCreight was a founding board member, serving the Council as treasurer, vice president, and president. She believed that the humanities were at the heart of a democratic society, a necessary source of wisdom and vision.
Presented each October, the McCreight Lecture affords West Virginians the opportunity to hear nationally respected scholars and public intellectuals on a variety of humanities topics. McCreight Lecturers have included Ken Burns, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph Ellis, Sylvia Nasar, Henry Louis Gates, Elaine Pagels, Gordon Wood, James McPherson, Edmund Morris, and Annette Gordon-Reed.
Admission to the McCreight Lectures is always free and open to the public.
