Hi, everyone.
I'm Diana Marie Delgado, the literary director
of the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
And I want to welcome everyone to another episode
of the Institute for Inquiry and Poetics,
featuring ambassadors from our Art for Justice Initiative.
The Institute for Inquiry and Poetics,
founded at the University of Arizona Poetry Center,
is a thought center designed to create space and time for poets
to respond to pressing questions that
reside at the intersection of social concern and poetry.
Encouraging interdisciplinary modalities
and investigative research, the institute
will ask poets a series of questions and digitally
archive their responses on poetry.arizona.edu,
in addition to YouTube and the Center's archive, Voca.
Tonight, I'm excited and honored to host Nicole Sealey, Hanif
Abdurraqib, and John Murillo, as part of Art
for Justice, a three-year project that commissions
new work from leading writers, in conversation
with the crisis of mass incarceration in the US,
with the goal of creating new awareness
and empathy through presentation and publication.
I want to give a special thanks to TJ Hill at the UA,
who is our producer, the Ford Foundation, and the entire team
at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, who
make this reading possible.
In our program tonight, we are hoping
to encourage an organic conversation
about the process, craft of poetry,
the ethics of mass incarceration,
writing about it.
In order to encourage that dialogue,
we will have each poet read a poem,
and then have another poet respond
to the work with the poem that they've
created for the project.
We're encouraging conversation between the poets
as a means of deeper understanding in the many forms
of impact that mass incarceration
has on so many lives.
Let me begin with introducing all of our three
readers and their bios.
Nicole Sealey.
Nicole Sealey is the author of "Ordinary Beast,"
finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy
Awards, and "The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named,"
winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.
Her honors include a Rome Prize from the American Academy
in Rome, a Hodder fellowship from Princeton University,
the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry
Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award from the New England Poetry
Club, and a Poetry International Prize,
grants from the Elizabeth George and Jerome foundations,
as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference,
Canto Mundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell,
the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Poetry Project.
Nicole, you've been busy.
Formerly the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation,
she is a visiting professor at Boston University, City College
of New York, and Syracuse University,
and also teaches in New York University's Low-Residency MFA
Writers Workshop in Paris.
Welcome, Nicole.
Continuing with our program, we will also
be hosting Hanif Abdurraqib, who is a poet, essayist
and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio.
His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN America,
and various other journals.
His essays and music criticism have
been published in the FADER, Pitchfork, the New Yorker,
and the New York Times.
His first full length poetry collection,
"The Crown Ain't Worth Much," was released in June 2016
from Button Poetry.
It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize
and was nominated for Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
With Big Lucks, he released the limited edition chapbook,
"Vintage Sadness," in summer 2017.
You can't get it anymore.
And he's very sorry.
His first collection of essays, "They Can't Kill Us
Until They Kill Us," was released in winter 2017
by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year
by BuzzFeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, the Los
Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and the Chicago Tribune,
among others.
Amazing.
He released "Go Ahead in the Rain:
Notes to a Tribe Called Quest" with University of Texas Press
in February 2019.
The book became a New York Times best seller,
was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize,
and was longlisted for the National Book Award.
His second collection of poems, "A Fortune For Your Disaster,"
was released in 2019 by Tin House,
and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize.
In 2021, he will release the book "A Little Devil
in America" with Random House.
He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Welcome, Hanif.
John Murillo is up also.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections,
"Up Jump the Boogie," Cypher, 2010, Four Way, 2020,
finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN
Open Book Award.
And "Contemporary American Poetry,"
forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2020.
But that's out, you can get that now.
His honors include a Pushcart Prize,
the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from the Poetry
Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference,
Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,
Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute
for Creative Writing.
His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry
Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner,
and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020.
He's an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University
and also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program
at Sierra Nevada College.
Welcome, John.
Hey.