photography

Laura Tohe reads from Tséyi': Deep in the Rock; Reflections on Canyon de Chelly (2005), which pairs Tohe's texts with images by photographer Stephen E. Strom. Following Tohe's reading, Strom discusses the images contained in the book.

Leslie Marmon Silko reads Sacred Water (1993), a book-length lyric essay. This reading was originally given with Joy Harjo.

In this artists' talk, photographer Seamus Murphy and journalist/poet Eliza Griswold discuss their experiences in Afghanistan and the poems and photographs featured in the exhibition Shame Every Rose: Images from Afghanistan. This exhibition, which traveled to the Poetry Center courtesy of the Poetry Foundation of Chicago, featured photographs presented in pairs to echo the couplet form of the landay, an oral folk poetry created by and for the Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The landays featured in this exhibit also appear in the June 2013 issue of Poetry magazine, as well as in the anthology I Am The Beggar of The World (2014).

Author and illustrator Faye Kicknosway reads poems from her book The Cat Approaches (1978); she also reads from a manuscript that would eventually become the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Who Shall Know Them? (1985), a series of ekphrastic poems engaging with Walker Evans's famed photographs of life during the Great Depression. This reading was originally given alongside readings by Alan Feldman and Linda Gregg.

Rachel Zucker reads from an unpublished manuscript tentatively titled "Sound Machine."

Claudia Rankine reads from and discusses Citizen (2014). This reading incorporates artwork included in Citizen as well as other visual materials, including additional works by artists featured in Citizen and the video essay "Situation 8" by Claudia Rankine and John Lucas. 

Rachel Zucker reads from an early draft of The Poetics of Wrongness (2023), her collection of essay-lectures which consider confessional poetry, the ethics of writing about one's life and relationships, and the primacy of motherhood. This lecture was originally given with Timothy Donnelly and Srikanth Reddy as part of the 2018 Bagley Wright Lecture Series conference "You Are Who I Am Talking To: Poetry, Attention, and Audience."

O'odham poets Ofelia Zepeda, Su:k Chu:vak Fulwilder, and Amber Lee Ortega read poems in English and O'odham from the exhibition The Place Where Clouds Are Formed (April 4-August 31, 2024). Their poems and commentary focus on O'odham identity, experiences including displacement and violence, the importance of honoring the desert, and the resilience of individuals and communities. Traditional religion and Catholicism are discussed throughout.