W&L Hosts 21st Annual Tom Wolfe Weekend The weekend’s seminar will feature award-winning author George Saunders discussing his new novel, “Vigil.”

By Emily Innes Stanley
March 27, 2026

Washington and Lee University will host its 21st annual Tom Wolfe Weekend April 17-18. The weekend’s seminar will feature George Saunders, whose new novel “Vigil” has been named a New York Times bestseller. This year’s seminar is co-sponsored by the Office of Lifelong Learning and the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics.

Registration is required for Friday evening’s reception and dinner and Saturday’s luncheon and can be accessed online. W&L faculty, staff and students interested in attending should call the Office of Lifelong Learning for discounted registration information at 540-458-8723.

Saunders will present the keynote address at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, April 17, in Stackhouse Theater, located in Elrod Commons. The keynote address and additional programming on Saturday are free and open to the public.

Saunders became the second American to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2017 for his first novel “Lincoln in the Bardo,” and is known as one of America’s most influential and unique writers. “Vigil,” published in January 2026, centers around the bedside conversation between a dying oil company CEO and his angelic guide as he is ushered from our world to the next. The novel confronts the value of a life well-lived, the philosophical question of regret and the environmental and cultural consequences a single individual can create.

Joining Saunders in the programming on April 18 will be W&L faculty members Melissa Kerin, director of the Roger Mudd Center for Ethics, and Leah Green, eco-poet and W&L writer-in-residence. In its themes of morality and environmental responsibility, “Vigil” coincides neatly with the Mudd Center’s current lecture series on “Land Use and Environmental Impact,” and will provide a starting point for the weekend’s conversations on ethics and environmentalism.

Learn more about the programming for Tom Wolfe Weekend here.

The Tom Wolfe Weekend is sponsored by the W&L Class of 1951 in honor of their classmate Tom Wolfe ’51. Each year, the program invites a writer who exemplifies Wolfe’s tradition of careful elocution and observation of America, its people, its institutions and its ideas.