Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently The Book of Seventy (winner of the National Jewish book Award), The Old Woman, the Tulip and the Dog, and Waiting for the Light. She has received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and has been twice nominated for the National Book Award, among other honors. As a critic she is the author of Stealing the Language; the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on poetry and on the Bible. She is distinguished Professor Emerita of Rutgers University, teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA program at Drew university, and is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. This event is part of the Jewish Cultural Studies Program.
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Alicia Ostriker
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Alena Graedon
Alena Graedon’s first novel, The Word Exchange, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus. It has been translated into eight languages. She has twice been a MacDowell Colony Fellow
(2012 and 2017), and has also received fellowships at Yaddo, Ucross, The Virginia Center for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and Jentel. Her nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Believer magazine, Guernica, and Post Road among other publications. A native of Durham, NC, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s MFA program, and she is an Assistant Professor of English at Monmouth University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. -
Eleanor Hooker & Clodagh Beresford Dunne
Two Irish poets, Eleanor Hooker and Clodagh Beresford Dunne will read from their works. Eleanor Hooker is a poet and writer. In 2013, her debut collection of poetry, The Shadow Owner’s Companion was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for Best First Irish Collection. In 2016, she published her second collection of poems A Tug of Blue and she was included as one of Poetry Ireland Review’s ‘Rising Generation’ of Irish poets. In February 2016, her flash fiction The Lesson was awarded 1st Prize in the Bare Fiction Flash Fiction competition in the UK. Her poetry has been published in literary journals internationally including: POETRY (Chicago), PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, AGENDA Poetry, The Stinging Fly, The SHOp, The Moth, The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, Crannóg, POEM: International English Language Quarterly and Cyphers.
Clodagh Beresford Dunne was the recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Emerging-Writer Award Bursary, 2016. Her poems have appeared in Irish and international print and online journals, including Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, Southword, The Moth, The Pickled Body, Spontaneity and Pittsburgh Poetry Review. She is the recipient of a number of literature awards from Irish Artlinks, Waterford City and County Arts Office. Born and raised in a regional newspaper family, her writing was first committed to print at age 8. Described by Irish poet Thomas McCarthy as “a writer of great seriousness and purpose,” Beresford Dunne’s poetry has been hailed as “announcing a new vision to us, a new vortex of energy that localises human experience and domesticates genius.”
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Marlon James
Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. His recent novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean
Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. It was also a New York Times Notable Book. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. James lives in Minneapolis. -
Odie Lindsey
Odie Lindsey’s story collection, We Come to Our Senses (W.W. Norton), was included on Best Of lists at Electric Literature and Military Times, and the New York Times Book Review noted that it “captures our culture now.” Lindsey’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Iowa Review, Guernica, Fourteen Hills, Electric Literature, and in the anthology Forty Stories. He has received an NEA fellowship for veterans, a Tennessee Arts Commission fellowship in Literature, and a Tennessee Williams scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Lindsey’s essays have appeared in the Oxford American, Columbia, The Millions, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an M.A. in southern studies from the University of Mississippi, and a combat badge c/o the U.S. Army. He is Professor of the Practice at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University. Lindsey’s novel is forthcoming, also from W.W. Norton.
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Michael Waters
Michael Waters has published twelve books of poetry, most recently The Dean of Discipline (U Pittsburgh P, 2018) and Celestial Joyride (BOA Editions, 2016). Darling Vulgarity (2006) was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001) was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. He has co-edited several anthologies, including Reel Verse (Knopf, 2018), Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and Perfect in Their Art (Southern Illinois UP, 2003). His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review and The Progressive. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, he has been the recipient of five Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fulbright Foundation, and NJ State Council on the Arts, and residency fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, St. James Cavalier Centre (Malta), Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), and Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland). Waters is Professor of English at Monmouth University.
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Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, The Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and The Chicago Tribune, among others. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow, an interviewer at Union Station Magazine, and a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine. He is a member of the poetry collective Echo Hotel with poet/essayist Eve Ewing.
His next books are Go Ahead In The Rain, a biography of A Tribe Called Quest due out in 2019 by University of Texas Press, and They Don’t Dance No’ Mo’, due out in 2020 by Random House. Yes, he would like to talk to you about your favorite bands and your favorite sneakers.
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Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and is widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation. Young is also poetry editor at The New Yorker.
Also an editor, essayist, and curator, Young’s ten books of poetry include: Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014); Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels(Knopf, 2011), winner of an American Book Award; Dear Darkness (Knopf, 2008); For the Confederate Dead (Knopf, 2007); Black Maria (Knopf, 2005); To Repel Ghosts (“Remix,” Knopf, 2005); Jelly Roll: a blues(Knopf, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Prize and winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Most Way Home(William Morrow, 1995), winner of the National Poetry Series and the Zacharis First Book Award. His newest book of poetry is Brown(Knopf, April 2018).
Book of Hours was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awardand won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets—a prize that recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. In the Judges citation, A. Van Jordan wrote: “As if walking through a gallery of grief, reverie, and transcendence, Kevin Young’s Book of Hours exemplifies what poetry can do in the world when language works at its full power. The poems in this collection hold emotion taut on each line while allowing for the nimbleness of language to drape over them, bringing tension between the heart and the mind, as Young consistently surprises us with profound elegance.” Actor and author Mary-Louise Parker has described it as a memoir-in-verse and that “These glorious verses put me in some kind of trance.”
Young’s nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press November 14, 2017), is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize, and named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection, and a “Best Book of 2017” by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Dallas Morning News, Smithsonian, Vogue, Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. His previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The PEN judges said of the book: “Like Duke Ellington’s fabled, Harlem-bound A Train, Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness propels us across a panorama of African American history, creativity, and struggle with a lightning-brisk brilliance and purpose. Here’s what happens when an acclaimed poet makes his first foray into nonfiction: madcap manifesto and rhapsodic reportage create a formidable blend of scholarship and memoir that tackles cultural and personal history in one breath. Young goes far beyond just being a documentarian of American Black identity—he shows us how Black identity is indispensable to American culture.”
Young is the editor of eight volumes, including The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965 – 2010 (BOA Editions, 2012 and winner of the Hurston-Wright Prize); The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012); The Best American Poetry 2011; and The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, one hundred and fifty devastatingly beautiful contemporary elegies that embrace the pain, heartbreak, and healing stages of mourning (Bloomsbury, 2010). Young’s poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo.
From 2005-2016, Kevin Young served as Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library—a 75,000-volume collection of rare and modern poetry housed at Emory University. As curator, Young was responsible for growing the collection, running a reading series, and mounting exhibitions. In 2008, Young was also named Curator of Literary Collections, and continued to add to the outstanding growing collections at Emory’s Rose Library, which holds the archives of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes; National Book Award–winner Lucille Clifton; influential iconoclasts Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, and Salman Rushdie; Pulitzer Prize–winners Alice Walker, Natasha Trethewey, and Alan Dugan; and current British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. His many other honors include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from Beloit College.