Lecture “Aliveness & the Black Poem”
Inspired by this year’s theme Aliveness, we are hosting a public conversation, Aliveness & the Black Poem, with James Russell Lowell Prize Winner and author of Black Aliveness, Kevin Quashie; Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner, Tracy K. Smith; 2023 Shelley Memorial Award Winner, Evie Shockley. This amazing discussion will be moderated by Rutgers-Newark Professor and the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry Winner, John Keene.
About Kevin Quashie
Kevin Quashie teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the Department of English at Brown University. Primarily, he focuses on black feminism, queer studies, and aesthetics, especially poetics. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being (2021). Black Aliveness has been awarded two prizes: the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association (2022) and the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation (2022). Currently, he is thinking about literary criticism as a form of estrangement and consolation, or, said another way, he is thinking about the workings and potency of black sentences.
About Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body’s Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction.
In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies, and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She also hosts American Public Media’s daily radio program and podcast The Slowdown, which is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
About Evie Shockley
Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, poet Evie Shockley earned a BA at Northwestern University, a JD at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English literature at Duke University. The author of several collections of poetry, including A half-red Sea (2006) and the new black (2011), Shockley is also the author of the critical volume Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011). Her poetry and essays have been featured in several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook (2010), A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets on the Line (2011), and Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2013). Shockley’s honors include the Holmes National Poetry Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Coeditor of the journal Jubilant from 2004 to 2007, Shockley is a professor at Rutgers University. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.
About John Keene
John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Annotations (1995) and Counternarratives (2015), both published by New Directions. 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 a Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.
Time: 5:00-7:00 pm EDT
Free!
