Experience the newest poetry collections from CAConrad and Golden. CAConrad engages with extinction and regeneration within the Anthropocene in Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books, 2024). CAConrad’s electrifying sculptural poems ebb and flow like a current and as each new piece is formed, they collapse, eternally returning to themselves. Golden’s second collection, Reprise (Haymarket, 2025), is also a book of births and returns. Pairing photography and poetry, Golden documents the realities of being Black and trans in America with subtle lyricism and vulnerability.

Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.

About the Poets:

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

Golden (they/them) is a Black gender-nonconforming photographer, author, & educator raised in Hampton, VA (Kikotan land), currently residing in Boston, Massachusetts (Massachusett people & Wampanoag land). They are the author of A Dead Name That Learned How to Live (Game Over Books, 2022), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Transgender Poetry (2023), and Reprise (Haymarket Books, 2025). Their photographic series On Learning How to Live, an Arnold Newman Prize Finalist (2021), documents Black trans life at the intersections of surviving & living in the United States.