National Book Award-winning poet and Princeton alumnus, Nathaniel Mackey, Class of 1969, reads from his work. Mackey is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, a multi-volume fiction work, two books of criticism, and co-editor of two anthologies. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cosponsored by the English Department with support from the Bain-Swiggett Fund.

About the Poet:

Born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, a Californian most of his life, and a resident of Durham, North Carolina, since 2010, Nathaniel Mackey is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and editor. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently By Bent Light (The Bodily Press, 2025) and Double Trio (New Directions, 2021), a boxed set of three books: Tej Bet, So’s Notice and Nerve Church. He is also the author of a multi-volume fiction work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fifth and final volume is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017), and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024). He has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Mackey is currently the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University.