Poetry Reading: Douglas Kearney and Ariana Reines

Friday, October 18, 2024, 5pm

A reading by Douglas Kearney and Ariana Reines, followed by a reception/signing.

Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here

About the Poets:

Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner and a National Book Award, Pen America, and Kingsley Tufts Award finalist. Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), is the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: “[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.”  Starts Spinning (Rain Taxi), a chapbook of poetry, saw publication in 2019. A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul.

Born in Salem, Massachusetts, poet, playwright, and translator Ariana Reines earned a BA from Barnard College, and completed graduate work at both Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), Coeur de Lion (2007), Mercury (2011), Thursday (2012), Beyond Relief (2013), The Origin of the World (2014), Ramayana (2015), Tiffany’s Poems (2015), and A Sand Book (2019). Her poems have been anthologized in Corrected Slogans (2013), Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Materials (2011), Against Expression (2011), and Gurlesque (2010). Known for her interest in bodily experience, the occult, new media, and the possibilities of the long or book-length form, Reines has been described as “one of the crucial voices of her generation” by Michael Silverblatt on NPR’s Bookworm. At once personal, Romantic, slippery, and extreme, Reines’s poetry investigates and overturns lyric conventions. Of her own work, she admitted in an interview with HTML Giant: “My best writing seems to have to be forced from me by some other force but that force has to be one whose power I agree to serve.” Reines was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2020. She has taught at Columbia University and the European Graduate School, where she studied literature, performance, and philosophy. In 2009 she was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley, the youngest poet to ever hold that position. She has served as a translator on United Nations missions to Haiti, as part of the on-going relief efforts there.