masculinity

David Ignatow reads widely from his work of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; this reading also includes several uncollected poems.

Luis Alberto Urrea reads from Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (1993), The Fever of Being (1994), Wandering Time: Western Notebooks (1999), and also from The Best American Poetry (1996).

In this lecture on Homer titled "We Should Shudder," Michael Schmidt discusses the distance of early Greek sensibility from our own and the power of impersonal writing in Homer's poems, reflecting upon what modern poets can learn from this approach. He also incorporates readings of poems by W.H. Auden and Edwin Muir.

Venita Blackburn reads from Black Jesus and Other Superheroes (2017) as well as one story, "Fam," that would later appear in her collection How to Wrestle a Girl (2021).

Joseph O. Legaspi reads poems from his collections Imago (2007) and Threshold (2017) as well as two uncollected poems. This reading was originally given alongside Javier Zamora and Kim Addonizio at the Center for Creative Photography. 

Edgar Kunz reads from his first two books, Tap Out (2019) and Fixer (2023). Many of the poems he reads center on his father, who suffered from addiction, and reflect on his father's death. He closes with two love poems.

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.