Refreshments 8-9pm

John Keene, the National Book Award Winner for Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021) is joined by poet and performance artist, Pamela Sneed, the author of Funeral Diva (City Lights, 2020). Each poet will read from their books and contribute to a wide-ranging conversation from coming of age during the AIDS epidemic to publishing new poetry amidst the unknowns of 2020 & 2021.  This event is presented with generous support from the Battery Park City Authority.

About the Authors:

John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015). Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle, and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

Poet, professor, and performer, Pamela Sneed is the award-winning author for Funeral Diva (City Lights, 2020). She is also the writer of Sweet Dreams, Kong, and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery. She was a Visiting Critic at Yale, and at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems.