Spectral Evidence is Gregory Pardlo’s first major collection of poetry after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Digest. This new collection moves among considerations of the professional wrestler Owen Hart; Tituba, the only Black woman to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials; MOVE, the militant separatist group famous for its violent stand-offs with the Philadelphia Police Department; and other historical topics. Pardlo compels us to consider how we think about devotion, beauty, art, justice, the criminalization and death of Black bodies, and how these have been inscribed into our present, our history, and the Western canon.

Gregory Pardlo worked on Spectral Evidence during his 2020-2021 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He will discuss the book with professor Imani Perry.

About the Authors:

Gregory Pardlo’s collection Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Pardlo is poetry editor at Virginia Quarterly Review and director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

Imani Perry is the author of South to America, winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction. She is the Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Perry’s other books include Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 Bograd-Weld Biography Prize from the Pen America Foundation; Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two sons.