Celebrate the extraordinary Brenda Hillman and her friends in poetry—Evelyn Reilly, Patricia Spears Jones, Major Jackson, Donna Masini, and Ama Codjoe—reading poems written by or inspired by her work. The evening culminates in a reading from Hillman and a conversation led by Patricia Spears Jones.

Brenda Hillman is a poet, professor, editor, and translator who has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. Known for her inimitable innovations in poetic form, Hillman’s work bridges lyrical and political poetics in writing. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hillman has also received the William Carlos Williams Prize from Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Hillman is Emerita Professor of English at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. Last year, her Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Lectures at the University of Virginia were published as her first prose collection, Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality.

Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow.

About the poets:

Brenda Hillman is the author of numerous collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire,which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry; Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days; and her most recent In a Few Minutes Before Later. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Evelyn Reilly is a New York-based poet, scholar and environmentalist. Her books include Styrofoam, Apocalypso and Echolocation, published by Roof Books; Hiatus, published by Barrow Street Press; and Having Broken, Are which was recently published by BlazeVOX. Styrofoam is widely read and written about as an example of ecopoetics and avant-garde experimentation. Reilly‘s poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is co-curator of the OtherWords Reading Series in Great Barrington, MA and also a member of the Steering Committee of the climate activist group 350NYC.

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, educator, cultural activist, anthologist and recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and is author of The Beloved Community (Copper Canyon, 2023) and 4 other collections and five chapbooks. Her poems are widely anthologized, and recent work is published in The New Yorker and The Brooklyn Rail. She curated programs at The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. Photo by Brett Hall Jones for Community of Writers.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.

Donna Masini is the author of three books of poems—4:30 Movie (W.W. Norton, 2018), Turning to Fiction (Norton, 2004), That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994)—and a novel, About Yvonne (Norton,1998). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Five Points. A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and NY Foundation for the Arts grants, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowship residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Bogliasco and Yaddo, she is a Professor of English/Creative Writing at Hunter College. She has is currently working on her new collection of poems, Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? Photo by Claire Holt.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum.