Writers at Rutgers is a series that creates the opportunity for exchange between well-known writers of diverse backgrounds and Rutgers students, faculty, and the general public. The event includes an author reading, Q&A session, book sale and signing, and catered reception. Free to attend. Register for free parking here.
On Tuesday, April 9, join us for a special night of poetry to celebrate Mark Doty, featuring guest poets Jericho Brown, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and Tracy K. Smith.
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.
Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures.
Tracy K. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars. Smith’s memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and named a Notable Book by both the New York Times and Washington Post. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-2019. She is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.