Poetry @ Princeton

New Works: Catherine Barnett and Jason Koo
2024-09-04 19:00 - 21:00 (America/New_York) | The Poet’s House, 10 River Terrace, New York, NY, 10282, United States
Celebrate Catherine Barnett and Jason Koo as they each read from their fourth full-length poetry collections: Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Graywolf, 2024) and No Rest (Diode Editions, 2024). The pair will discuss metaphysics, grief, and what new poetic territory they’ve breached in their most recent books.
Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room. Books will be available for purchase before and after the reading. We have a 70-person capacity, so please RSVP early.
About the Poets:
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space; Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri fellow, she received a 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
Jason Koo is a second-generation Korean American poet, educator, editor and nonprofit director. He is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: No Rest, a winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest, More Than Mere Light, America’s Favorite Poem and Man on Extremely Small Island. His work has been published in Best American Poetry 2022, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Village Voice and Yale Review, among other places, and won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute. He is an associate teaching professor of English and the director of creative writing at Quinnipiac University and the founder and executive director of Brooklyn Poets. (Photo by Autumn Driscoll).

Claudia Rankine & Jess Row Discuss Don’t Let Me Be Lonely & The New Earth
2024-09-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Central Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY, 11238, United States
Co-Presented with Books Are Magic, BPL Presents welcomes Claudia Rankine and Jess Row. A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past, award-winning author Jess Row’s The New Earth confronts humanity’s uncertain future.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars—doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age. First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness—a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence. Buy the book from Books Are Magic here.
The New Earth: For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper. Buy the book from Books Are Magic here.
Additional copies will be available for purchase from Books Are Magic at the event.

The Cornelius Eady Group: PAINTING Release Party
2024-09-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street (NYC)
In-Person | Saturday | September 7 | 4-6pm | Free with RSVP
Join us for a special performance by the Cornelius Eady Group and readings by Merrick Sloane and Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador in celebration of the release of the PAINTING EP. This event is free and open to the public. Digital copy of the EP, PAINTING, with $10 donation. All donations benefit Poets House.
From Cornelius Eady: Come help me continue to celebrate my 70th birthday year while helping to support one of the best homes for poetry in the country. Our latest project, PAINTING, is an eight track acoustic EP that we’re very proud of, and when thinking of places to launch it we realized there couldn’t be a better location than Poets House, a place where all sorts of singing thrives. If you haven’t dropped by to check out Poets House’s rise from the ashes, this is your excuse. If you’ve been missing my January birthday parties, this is your chance to gather. If you’ve been wanting to hear the three of us live in New York, something that doesn’t happen that often, your opportunity has just sailed in.
About the Performers:
Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and the John C. Hodges Chair of Excellence in Poetry at the University of Tenn. Knoxville, a position last held by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Lisa Liu is a guitarist based in Brooklyn, NY. She plays gypsy jazz, experimental, folk, and solo guitar. Liu is an Artist Ambassador for Santa Cruz Guitar Company and is also endorsed by Krivo Pickups. She is a Teaching Artist at Django In June, and has also been an Artist In Residence at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.
NYC based guitarist/composer Charlie Rauh has been invited to be resident composer by such organizations as The Rauschenberg Foundation, The Klaustrid Foundation, and The Chen Dance Center. His work as a soloist has been supported by grants from Meet The Composer, The Untitled Artist Group, and The Fractured Atlas Group. Rauh’s approach to solo guitar composition takes inspiration from folk lullabies, plainchant, and the imagery of various poets ranging from the Brontës to Anna Akhmatova. Acoustic Guitar Magazine notes that “Charlie Rauh plays guitar with a quiet intensity, each note and chord ringing with purpose…With these lullabies Rauh gives a gentle reminder that playing soft and slow can be more impactful than loud and fast.” Rauh is currently signed to the Austin based label Destiny Records as a soloist and recording artist.
About the Poets
Born and raised in México, Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador (she/ella) is a poet, editor, interpreter-translator, and MFA student at The University of Tennessee. She is a British Centre for Literary Translation, Under The Volcano, Community of Writers, and Letras Latinas fellow. Her work has been published in Aster Lit, FlowerSong Press, The McNeese Review, and elsewhere. She is working on her first poetry collection and is the Nonfiction Editor for Grist Journal.
Merrick Sloane (they/them) is a Queer 90’s kid and nonbinary poet from OKC who’s a sucker for expletives and second languages. Their chapbook, Queerly Beloved, was self-published in 2020. Their work has appeared in the first and only gender and sexuality journal in Oklahoma, The Central Dissent, and in Stories for the Road: Trauma and Internal Communication. Merrick was a 2020 and 2021 DreamYard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium fellow. Currently, Merrick serves as the Poetry Editor of Grist, and as the host of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s reading series Chiasmus where they are pursuing their MFA. Merrick writes so that others may feel radically loved.

New Works: Diane Seuss and Leah Umansky
2024-09-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street (NYC)
Tune in for a virtual reading with Diane Seuss and Leah Umansky, reading from their newest collections, Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2024) and Of Tyrant (Word Works Books, 2024). In poems and in conversation, Seuss and Umansky consider poetic and political authority from the academy to the office. It will be an indispensable conversation on the role of the poet in the public forum from two poets testing the bounds of their practice.
Diane Seuss will read virtually, and Leah Umansky will read in-person. Please RSVP below and check the page on September 11 for a Zoom link.
About the Poets:
Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is Modern Poetry. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021) was the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss was a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021. She was recently elected to the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home. (Photo by Gabrielle Montesanti).
Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, Of Tyrant. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work can be found in such places as PBS, The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, USA Today, Poetry, and American Poetry Review. She is a writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as Poetry School London, Poets House, Hudson Valley Writers Center, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems, Ordinary Splendor, on wonder, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on Instagram.

A Tribute to Tyrone Williams
2024-09-12 18:30 - 21:00 | Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street (NYC)
Join us in honoring the life, work and legacy of seminal poet and scholar Tyrone Williams.
Poets, colleagues, and friends including Pat Clifford, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs, Thom Donovan, Barbara Henning, Erica Hunt, Brenda Iijima, Pierre Joris, Burt Kimmelman, Mike Lala, Andrew Levy, C.J. Martin, and Julie Patton will read work by and about Williams.
Bring your remembrance! We’ll have an open-mic for everyone who wishes to contribute their reflections on their dear friend and colleague.
Refreshments will be served.
About the Poet:
Tyrone Williams taught literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio for four decades. He is the author of several chapbooks and five books of poetry: c.c., On Spec, The Hero Project of the Century, Adventures of Pi, and Howell. A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published in 2017.

Poetry Reading: Catherine Barnett and Claudia Rankine
2024-09-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York City
Poetry Reading: Catherine Barnett and Claudia Rankine
Thursday, September 12, 7pm
A reading by Catherine Barnett and Claudia Rankine followed by a conversation/Q&A and a reception/signing.
Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here
About the Poets:
Catherine Barnett is the author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004); The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), which won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; Human Hours (Graywolf, 2018); and Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (Graywolf Press, 2024). Her poetry has been published in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s column, “American Life in Poetry.” She teaches at New York University and Hunter College and works as an independent editor. She lives in New York City.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind.
In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.

Confessional: Book Launch for Fletch Fletcher
2024-09-13 18:00 - 21:00 | Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street (NYC)
Celebrate the launch of Fletch Fletcher‘s Confessional (Finishing Line Press, 2024) with readings by Michael Lee Bross, Roberto Carlos Garcia, Michelle Greco, Darla Himeles, and Yesenia Montilla! Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room. We have a 70-person capacity, so please RSVP early.
About the Poets:
Michael Lee Bross holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. His debut poetry chapbook, Meditations on an Empty Stomach was published by Finishing Line Press (October 2019), and his poems have appeared Lifeboat, Mobius Poetry Magazine, and Let’s Talk Philadelphia, among others. Michael currently teaches English at the University of Scranton and East Stroudsburg University.
Fletch Fletcher is a poet (obviously), a science teacher, a brother, and a bunch of other random things that may or may not help you understand him. He was lucky enough to work with and learn from amazing poets while getting an MFA in Poetry at Drew University. Fletcher’s first collection, Existing Science (2021), was published by Assure Press.
Poet, storyteller, and essayist Roberto Carlos Garcia is rigorously interrogative of himself and the world around him, and writes extensively about the Afro-Latinx and Afro-diasporic experience. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, The BreakBeat Poets Vol 4: LatiNEXT, Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Root, and many others.
Michelle Greco is a Latina poet who both lives and teaches in Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from Drew University and is the author of the chapbook Field Guide to Fire (Finishing Line Press,2015). Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Stillwater Review, Edison Literary Review, and the anthology Dear Sister, among others.
Darla Himeles is a Philadelphia-based poet, translator, and essayist. A Pushcart-Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee, Darla can be read in recent and forthcoming issues of Lesbians are Miracles, Orange Blossom Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Night Heron Barks, among others. Himeles is the assistant director Temple University’s writing center and teaches undergraduate poetry workshops.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet & a daughter of immigrants. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, and in Best of American Poetry. Her first collection The Pink Box was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

Megan Pinto, Jimin Seo, and Spencer Williams
2024-09-16 19:30 - 20:30 | Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, 686 Fulton Street
In this shared reading, poets Megan Pinto, Jimin Seo, and Spencer Williams take the Greenlight stage to present their debut poetry collections, Saints of Little Faith, OSSIA and TRANZ. In Saints of Little Faith, Pinto moves between personal and generational histories, through collisions of abuse, psychosis, and rage, alongside their reprieve: beauty, tenderness and the landscapes these forces inhabit. Seo’s OSSIA takes up a material we think we recognize—language—and transforms it through permutation, history, and translation, into a lyrical and alien terrain, and in TRANZ, Williams writes about the joys, perils, and bad jokes of transgender life and survivability. Following the reading, all three authors will come together in conversation, followed by a Q&A and signings. Wine reception to follow.

2024 Jackson Poetry Prize Reading
2024-09-17 19:00 - 20:00 | The Greene Space, 44 Charlton St, New York, NY, 10014, United States
The Jackson Poetry Prize honors an American poet of exceptional talent. It was established in 2006 with a gift from the Liana Foundation and is named for the John and Susan Jackson family. Eligible poets must have published at least two books of acknowledged literary merit. The 2024 prize carries a monetary value of $100,000. Nominees are identified by a group of poets selected by Poets & Writers who remain anonymous; final selection is made by a panel of esteemed poets.
The 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient is Fady Joudah. Esteemed poets Natalie Diaz, Gregory Pardlo, and Diane Seuss served as judges.
Poets & Writers is hosting a reading with Fady Joudah on September 17 in New York City. Joudah will be joined in conversation by Pádraig Ó Tuama.

PSA Reading Series: Hala Alyan & Carl Phillips
2024-09-19 19:00 - 20:00 | Poetry Society of America, 119 Smith Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
About the Poets:
Hala Alyan is a licensed clinical psychologist, professor at New York University, and writer. She is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. Her latest novel, The Arsonists’ City, was a finalist for the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of four award-winning collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year. Her work has been published by the New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, LitHub, the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. Her latest poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, was recently published by Ecco. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

Poetry Reading: Michael Chang and Jennifer Tseng
2024-09-20 17:00 - 19:00 | Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York City
Poetry Reading: Michael Chang and Jennifer Tseng
Friday, September 20, 5pm
A reading by Michael Chang and Jennifer Tseng, followed by a reception/signing.
Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here
About the Poets:
Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of TOY SOLDIERS (Action, Spectacle, 2024) & THINGS A BRIGHT BOY CAN DO (Coach House Books, 2025). They edit poetry at Fence.
Poet and fiction writer Jennifer Tseng was born in Indiana and raised in California by a first generation Chinese immigrant engineer and a third generation German American microbiologist. Her flash fiction collection, The Passion of Woo & Isolde (Rose Metal Press 2017), was a Firecracker Award finalist and winner of an Eric Hoffer Book Award; her novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions 2015), was shortlisted for the PEN American Center’s Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New England Book Award. MAYUMI is available in English, Italian, and Danish.
She’s also the author of four award-winning books of poetry, The Man With My Face(AAWW 2005); the bilingual Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press 2013) featuring Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen; and the chapbook, Not so dear Jenny (Bateau Press 2017), poems made with her father’s English letters. The full-length version of her chapbook, Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive, was published by UMass Press in April 2024. Tseng earned an MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA, an MFA in creative writing at University of Houston, and she was twice a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She’s currently an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz.

112th: Paul Celan & the Trans-Tibetan Angel trans. Susan Bernofsky with Marie Myung-Ok Lee
2024-09-24 19:00 - 20:00 | Book Culture, 536 W 112th Street, New York, NY, 10025, United States
Join us Tuesday, September 24th at 7pm for a reading to celebrate Susan Bernofsky’s recent translation of Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. She will be in conversation with Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Hurt You.
In order to facilitate this in-person author event, we will be partially closing the second floor starting at 5:45pm. Please review our Safety guidelines and register for the event using the link below.
A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award
Patrik, who sometimes calls himself “the patient,” is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, “What have you done to your head? I don’t want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!” He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can’t manage to get past the first question on the registration form: “What is your nationality?” Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man’s name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik…
In the spirit of imaginative homage like Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain, Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem, and Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Yoko Tawada’s mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which friendship, conversation, reading, poetry, and music are the connecting threads that bind us together.
About the Authors:
Susan Bernofsky is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of the Arts, and Director of Literary Translation at Columbia in the School of the Arts Writing Program. On the University Senate, Sen. Bernofsky serves on the Rules of University Conduct Committee.
A 2020 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, 2019 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and past Guggenheim fellow, Sen. Bernofsky has translated more than twenty books including three novels and four collections of short prose by the great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser, as well as Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. She is the author, most recently, of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser (Yale, 2021), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Past awards include the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize and the Hermann Hesse Translation Prize. Her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of Days (2014) won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, The Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize, the Ungar Award for Literary Translation, and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2019 she received the Modern Language Association’s Lois Roth Award and the Friedrich Ulfers Prize. Her translation of Yoko Tawada’s novel Paul Celan and the Transtibetan Angel is forthcoming in 2023 from New Directions. She is currently working on a new translation of Thomas Mann’s monumental novel The Magic Mountain for W.W. Norton.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, which looks at the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there, before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division. She is one of the few journalists who have been allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Emancipator, and The Guardian, among others. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Book Launch: Fifteenth Anniversary Edition of Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng by m. nourbeSe philip, featuring a conversation with Tonya Foster
2024-09-25 20:00 - 21:30 | The Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th Street (at 2nd Ave), New York, NY, 10003, United States
Please join us on Wednesday, September 25th at 8pm as we celebrate the release of the new and expanded fifteenth-anniversary edition of Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng by m. nourbeSe philip, published by Graywolf Press. m. nourbeSe philip will be joined in conversation by Tonya M. Foster. Book sales will be managed by Books Are Magic.
Zong! is a haunting lifeline between archive and memory, law and poetry.
In November 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson v. Gilbert—the only extant public document related to the massacre—Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.
This fifteenth-anniversary edition features a new preface by the author and new essays by Saidiya Hartman and Katherine McKittrick. Widely regarded as one of the most influential and revered works of twenty-first-century literature, this new edition of Zong! will ensure this staggering work’s enduring legacy.
This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project’s YouTube channel.

An Evening with New York State Poet Patricia Spears Jones
2024-09-26 18:30 - 20:30 | Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Malcolm X Blvd, New York, NY, 10030, United States
Join us for an evening of readings and conversation with New York State Poet Laureate Patricia Spears Jones. Jones is a poet, playwright, educator, and cultural activist. Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, her most recent book The Beloved Community was released in 2023. Jones’s archives are housed in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division at Schomburg Center. The evening will explore the evolution of her writing, the necessity of personal archives to shape one’s legacy, and the use of archives to develop new material. Jones will be in conversation with Brent Hayes Edwards, professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. This is an official 2024 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event.
Learn more about Patricia Spears Jones’s archives at the Schomburg Center:

Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division
Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division
Other material material across NYPL

About the Authors:

PATRICIA SPEARS JONES is the New York State Poet Laureate, a playwright, educator, and cultural activist. Winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, Jones is author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and three full-length collections and five chapbooks. Her most recent book The Beloved Community was released in 2023.She co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. In addition to her published poems, essays, memoir, and interviews, she has curated programs at The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church. Jones is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor at Barnard College.
BRENT HAYES EDWARDS is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the Director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center. In 2022-23 he is one of the three inaugural Ford Foundation Scholars-in-Residence at The Museum of Modern Art. In 2015 Edwards was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His award-winning books include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003)and most recently, winner of the Jazz Journalists Association 2024 Award for Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music, by Henry Threadgill with Brent Hayes Edwards.

The New Salon: Anne Boyer in Conversation with Hari Kunzru
2024-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, New York City
The New Salon: Anne Boyer in Conversation with Hari Kunzru
Thursday, September 26, 7pm
A reading by Anne Boyer followed by a conversation/Q&A with Hari Kunzru and a reception/signing. Co-sponsored with NYU’s XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement.
Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here
About the Authors:
Poet and essayist Anne Boyer was born and raised in Kansas. She earned a BA from Kansas State University and an MFA from Wichita State University. Her works include The Romance of Happy Workers (2006), My Common Heart(2011), Garments Against Women (2015, 2016), which Maureen McLane described as “a sad, beautiful, passionate book that registers the political economy of literature and of life itself,” and Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018). According to critic Chris Strofollino, Boyer’s work “widens the boundaries of poetry and memoir as we know them.” She was the inaugural winner of the 2018 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and winner of the 2018 Whiting Award in nonfiction/poetry. She was also awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in early 2020 and the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for her book The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care. Boyer lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where since 2011 she has been a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, Blue Ruin, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone, from Pushkin Industries. He lives in Brooklyn.

COUPLET Reading Series The ‘THIRTEENTH’ Anniversary Event
2024-09-27 19:00 - 21:00 | The Red Room at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th St., New York, NY, 10003, United States
Come celebrate ’13’ years of COUPLET! COUPLET is a quarterly reading series, produced, curated and hosted by poet Leah Umansky since 2011. It features both emerging and established poets and is co-hosted by The Red Room. This will Livestream on the IG live at @couplet_series on IG.
Our readers for the ’13th Anniversary Event’ are:
1. Debora Kuan
2. Christian Teresi
3. Ruth Awad
4. Didi Jackson
5. Mark Doty
6. Marie Howe
About the Authors:
Debora Kuan is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Women on the Moon, Lunch Portraits, and XING. Her writing has appeared in Time magazine, Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, and other publications.
Christian Teresi is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work has been published in many journals, including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Literary Hub, and Narrative. What Monsters You Make of Them is his first collection. His work has been supported by a fellowship from the Washington, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. He holds degrees from Binghamton University and George Mason University. Born in Albany, New York, he currently lives in Washington, DC where he works on international education and public diplomacy initiatives.
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese American poet, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow, and the author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire, winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her work appears in The Atlantic, Poetry, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, The Believer, New Republic, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and Moon Jar (2020). Her poems have appeared in Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.
Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of four memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling What Is the Grass, Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.
Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

Daniel Borzutzky & Vincent Toro
2024-09-27 20:00 - 21:30 | St. Mark’s Church, 131 E. 10th Street (at 2nd Ave), New York, NY, 10003, United States
Holding onto the notion of the “human” while exploring its degraded definition within a world governed by capital, Vincent Toro and Daniel Borzutzky craft a poetics resisting the forces that reduce life to flesh and turn death into data. In the work of both these visionaries, the page becomes a technology to denormalize dystopia and estrange corporate lingo via the droning sounds of a new language.
This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project’s YouTube channel.

The James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets: Readings with Esther Belin, Kara Briggs, and Kateri Menominee
2024-09-28 17:00 - 19:00 | Poets House, 10 River Terrace, at Murray Street (NYC)
In-Person + Streamed on Zoom | Saturday | September 28 | 5-7pm
Join Esther Belin and the 2024 James Welch Prize winning poets Kara Briggs and Kateri Menominee, in-person or remotely on Zoom, for a reading and celebration of their work. Presented in partnership with Poetry Northwest and In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets).
Free entry for all, please RSVP below. You will receive a Zoom link in your email; the link will also be posted on this page on the day of the event.
About the winners:
Kara Briggs, a citizen of the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe, descended Yakama Nation, is a poet, journalist and author who lives north of Seattle. Her forthcoming book Rivers in my Veins from St. Julian Press is her first poetry collection. She recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Institute of American Indian Art. As an undergraduate she studied abroad with Irish poets in Ireland. She was a national columnist for ICT and investigative journalist at The Oregonian. She is a former president of the Native American Journalists Association. Her poetry is lyrical and gives readers a view on the deep connections tribes have to their lands and waters. She writes in poetic forms, particularly Japanese forms of haiku and haibun. She also writes in the rhythms of social dance songs from her tribes. Deep in her work is a tribal political perspective that seeks to elevate the reader’s understanding of contemporary Native peoples. She serves as vice president of Ecotrust, where she leads work with tribes across the West Coast.
Kateri Menominee writes from the smokey anchorage of Gnoozhekaning. She listens to Lofi Legend of Zelda playlists and plays Fallout.

About the judge:
2024 judge Esther Belin (Diné) is among the myriad of indigenous peoples on the planet to survive in urbanized areas. She is a graduate from the following institutions: UC Berkeley, IAIA, Antioch University. She considers the following locations her homeland: LA, Durango, Diné bike’yah. Her writing and art grows from an is an offering to the collective humanity, bila’ ashdla’ii. Esther is the author of two poetry books and coeditor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. Belin’s visual art combines a variety of disciplines and works to reframe the mythical primitivism often associated with Indigenous cultures. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and lives on the Colorado side of the four corners. Belin is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́:Diné Writers’ Collective, and teaches in the Native American and Indigenous Studies department at Fort Lewis College and in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
About the Prize:
Poetry Northwest’s James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poets is awarded for two outstanding poems, each written by an Indigenous U.S. poet. The prize is named for Blackfeet and Gros Ventre writer James Welch, whose early poems were featured in Poetry Northwest and who went on to become one of the region’s most important writers.
Finalists selected by poets from the board and advisory committee of In-Na-Po (Indigenous Nations Poets) with the editors of Poetry Northwest:
Mary Leauna Christensen | Kinsale Drake | Max Early | Chris Hoshnic | Ibe Liebenberg | Casandra Lopez | Malia Maxwell | Michael Wasson

Brooklyn Poets Reading Series: Kwame Dawes, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Yesenia Montilla
2024-09-29 18:30 - 20:00 | Brooklyn Poets, 144 Montague St, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
The next Brooklyn Poets Reading Series event at 144 Montague on Friday, September 29, will feature poets Paul Hlava Ceballos, Yesenia Montilla and Kwame Dawes! This is an official 2023 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event. Free and open to the public, the event will also be livestreamed via Zoom. Wine reception for in-person attendees will begin at 6 PM and readings will begin at 6:30. Book signing to follow.
Advance online ticketing for in-person guests will end at 5 PM on the day of the event. After that, in-person guests will be admitted at the door until we reach capacity. In-person guests are encouraged to get a ticket in advance, as space is limited. Virtual tickets will be available until start time at 6:30 PM (ET). A Zoom link will be emailed to all ticket holders.
Closed captions for the event will be available via Zoom. To request additional accommodations or more information, please contact us. Note that by attending the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. We strongly encourage all attendees to wear masks (regardless of vaccination status) except readers at a safe distance on stage. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of this code. Thank you for respecting our community.
About the Poets:
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His collaborative chapbook Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood shares pages with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe and Torkwase Dyson. He has been awarded fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and Poets House, and he has been featured on the Poetry podcast and Seattle’s the Stranger. His work has been translated into Ukrainian. He currently lives in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography.
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in poetry and poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 NYFA fellow. Her work has been published in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast and Best American Poetry 2021 and 2022. Her first collection The Pink Box, published by Willow Books, was longlisted for a PEN Open Book award. Her second collection Muse Found in a Colonized Body, published by Four Way Books, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2023.
Kwame Dawes has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism and essays, including, most recently, Nebraska (UNP, 2019), Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019) and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), cowritten with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA program. He is director of the African Poetry Book Fund and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
