S201.
New Poetry: A Wesleyan Reading
Saturday, March 11, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm
New work from five poets showing the breadth of Wesleyan’s poetry series. Diverse work includes anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets exploring queer desire and pagan tradition; prose poems pondering what makes us human if removed from the human world; poetic word play that nudges us to rethink our modern predicaments; the repurposing of literary modes from across centuries of African diasporic traditions; and lyric poems that replace the sovereign "I" with an ensemble of urgent, questioning voices.
Participants
Rae Armantrout has published fifteen books including Finalists, Versed—which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award—and Entanglements: poems in conversation with physics. At UCSD she co-created the Poetry for Physicists course. She has also collaborated on AI generated poems.
Evie Shockley’s poetry books include semiautomatic (Pulitzer Prize finalist), the new black (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award winner), and the forthcoming volume suddenly we. Her book of criticism is Renegade Poetics. She is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Sarah Blake is the author of three books of poetry: In Springtime, Let's Not Live on Earth, and Mr. West. She was awarded an NEA fellowship for poetry in 2013. She is also the author of two novels, Clean Air and Naamah, winner of a National Jewish Book Award. She lives outside of London.
Ranjit Hoskote is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Sleepwalker's Archive, Vanishing Acts, Central Time, Jonahwhale, Hunchprose, and Icelight. His translation of a 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic's poetry has appeared as I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded. He lives in Bombay, India.
Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021) selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander.
