writer in residence

Nicole Sealey reads from her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast (2017), sharing poems that approach the embodied experience of mortality and the violence-haunted reality of being a Black woman in contemporary America. Her selections include an ekphrastic poem and a true cento, composed of one hundred lines collected from other poets.

John Murillo, the Poetry Center's spring poet in residence, reads from Up Jump the Boogie (2010) and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (2020). His poems—many of them long poems—consider masculinity, the divide between boyhood and manhood, violence, and the ways we construct our sense of self.