THIBODAUX, La. – Nicholls State University is set to host the 2025 Fletcher Lecture Series, featuring internationally acclaimed, nonfiction writer Sarah Broom, on Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025 at 6 p.m. in Gouaux Hall Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.
A native of New Orleans, Broom was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction for her 2019 memoir, “The Yellow House.” “The Yellow House” chronicles a century of Broom’s family history, her life growing up in New Orleans East, the demise of her beloved childhood home after Hurricane Katrina and the ways the aftermath of Katrina irrevocably altered her neighborhood and her personal identity.
Dwight Garner of the New York Times called “The Yellow House,” “a major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.” Angela Flournoy, writing for the New York Times Book Review, called it “an instantly essential text.”
Broom holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She received a 2016 Creative Nonfiction Grant from the Whiting Foundation and makes her home in Harlem.
For 40 years, the Fletcher Lecture Series has brought major writers and literary figures to campus to speak and interact with students. Past lecturers have included luminaries such as Robert Penn Warren, Noel Polk, Lee Smith, Gerald Early, Marianne Robinson, Yuri Herrera, Maurice Carlos Ruffin and the filmmaker Behn Zeitlin.
The 2025 recipient of the Linda Stanga Award for Excellence in Literary Studies will also be recognized at the event. This year’s format will be an extended interview, conducted by Dr. Alex Fabrizio Sumpter, associate professor in the Nicholls Department of English, Modern Languages, and Cultural Studies, and Andrew Barbier, access services librarian at Nicholls’ Ellender Memorial Library.
Books will be available for purchase at the venue. A brief question-and-answer will conclude the interview and a book signing will follow.
To learn more about Nicholls’ Fletcher Lecture Series events, click here.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Friday, October 3, 2025
MEDIA CONTACT: Payton Suire
Media Relations & Publications Coordinator,
985.448.4141 or payton.suire@nicholls.edu