Celebrate the release of Like a Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, Haymarket Books’ anthology of writers speaking on the United States prison-industrial complex. Contributors Randall Horton, Angel Nafis, and Evie Shockley read powerful poems of witness which seek to address the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex. Like A Hammer explores how art and imagination can serve as vehicles for endurance, offering us the hope to envision a better future.

As part of this event, there will be a screening of a selection of films co-produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. These short films showcase Randall Horton, Evie Shockley and others, performing their own work, and in some cases, sharing the work of an incarcerated peer poet, from the Like a Hammer anthology.  

This event is presented in partnership with the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Haymarket Books.

About the Poets:

Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He is a  former member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders which received an American Book Award in Oral Literature and their musical project, The Baraka Sessions, was named best vocal jazz album by NPR. Randall’s latest collection of poetry {#289-128} is published by the University of Kentucky (2020) and received the American Book Award in 2021. His memoir Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays is published by Northwestern University Press. Randall is also cofounder of Radical Reversal, a music project with an emphasis on justice equity through the investigation of sound. Randall is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven. 

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Angel Nafis is a writer and the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, BLACK FUTURES, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She is the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she is The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Poet & scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we (NAACP Image Award; National Book Award Finalist), semiautomatic (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Pulitzer Prize finalist), and the new black (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). Among the honors for her body of work are the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award. Her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.