Poetry Reading: Yusef Komunyakaa, Adrie Kusserow, Tim Seibles, and Bruce Weigl

Friday, November 8, 2024, 5pm

Readings by Yusef Komunyakaa, Adrie Kusserow, Tim Seibles, and Bruce Weigl followed by a conversation/Q&A and reception/signing.

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

About the Poets:

Yusef Komunyakaa‘s numerous books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Magic City; Dien Cai Dau, which won the Dark Room Poetry Prize; I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head, winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Copacetic; and most recently, The Emperor of Water Clocks. Komunyakaa’s prose is collected in Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. His honors include the William Faulkner Prize from the Universite Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam, where he served as a correspondent and managing editor of the Southern Cross. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His most recent poetry collection, Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021, brings together selected poems from the past twenty years of Yusef Komunyakaa’s work, as well as new poems from the Pulitzer Prize winner. His latest book, I Said That Love Heals From Inside: Love Poems of Yusef Komunyakaa, will be published in September 2024.

Adrie Kusserow is a cultural anthropologist who works with Sudanese refugees in trying to build schools in war-worn South Sudan. Currently an associate professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, Kusserow earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. She is the author of two collections of poetry, both published by BOA Editions, Hunting Down the Monk (2002), and Refuge (2013). Her latest book, The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems, was published in January 2024.

Tim Seibles was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow. His seven books of poetry include Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. This was followed by One Turn Around the Sun in 2017. His latest collection,Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems was released by Etruscan Press in 2022.

Bruce Weigl was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1949. He enlisted in the U.S. Army at age eighteen and served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. After returning to the United States, he received a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from the University of New Hampshire, and a PhD from the University of Utah.Weigl published his first book of poetry, A Romance (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), while teaching at Lorain County Community College in Ohio. He has gone on to publish over a dozen poetry collections, including The Abundance of Nothing (Triquarterly Books, 2012), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Archaeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1999); Song of Napalm (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994); and Sweet Lorain (Triquarterly Books, 1996). Weigl is also the author of The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir (Grove Press, 2000). He has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at the University of Arkansas, Old Dominion University, and Pennsylvania State University, and he currently teaches at Lorain County Community College. He lives in Lorain, Ohio.