ekphrastic poetry

Tenney Nathanson reads poems that would later appear in his collection Erased Art Erased Art(2005).

Steve Orlen reads from Permission to Speak (1978) and A Place at the Table (1981).

Yona Harvey performs poems from Hemming the Water (2013) as well as work unpublished at the time of the reading. This reading was originally given with Craig Santos Perez as part of the Morgan Lucas Schuldt Memorial Reading Series.

Luci Tapahonso reads from her collections Seasonal Woman (1982) and A Breeze Swept Through (1987), beginning with a piece that combines spoken poetry with song.

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.

Patricia Spears Jones reads poems from across her career as published in A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (2015), along with uncollected work at the 2017 Thinking Its Presence conference. She also reads one poem from Stardust, landmines, and cartoons: Poems from 2006 to 2014 (2015).

Morgan Parker reads from her third poetry collection, Magical Negro (2019), which would be published the year after this reading. She also reads an excerpt from Tommy Pico's Nature Poem (2017). This reading was originally given with Tommy Pico as part of the Morgan Lucas Schuldt Memorial Reading Series. 

Peggy Shumaker reads poems from Cairn: New and Selected Poems and Prose (2018) as well as one uncollected poem. This reading was originally given with Maurya Simon as the inaugural reading in the Tom Sanders Memorial Reading Series.

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.