October 10, 2026, 7:00pm – Brookwood Library in Hillsboro

Jeff VanderMeer’s NYT-bestselling, critically acclaimed Southern Reach series has been translated into 39 languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was made into a movie by Paramount starring Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, and Natalie Portman. The most recent installment is Absolution, a NYT bestseller and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Dead Astronauts, Borne (a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Strange Bird, set in the Borne universe, are being developed for TV by AMC and continue to explore themes related to the environment, animals, and our future.

Called “the weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker, VanderMeer frequently speaks about issues related to Florida, climate change, and storytelling, including at Vanderbilt, DePaul, MIT, the Key West Literary Seminar, Yale, and the Guggenheim. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, among many others, and was the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York. For eleven years, VanderMeer served as the co-director of Shared Worlds, a unique teen SF/fantasy writing camp he helped found, located at Wofford College in South Carolina.

VanderMeer’s nonfiction titles include the innovative Wonderbook, the world’s first (and only) fully illustrated general writing guide, and Booklife, the first career guide to integrate the internet into tactics and strategy. Nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Esquire, TIME, Current Affairs, Vulture, and the Los Angeles Times. He was a 2019 National Book Award judge for fiction and previously served as a judge for the Eisner Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, among others.