Join us for this headline reading featuring Tyehimba Jess and Naomi Shihab Nye, with a special opening reading by Boston Poet Laureate Porsha Olayiwola.
Link to recording: https://salemstate.zoom.us/rec/share/t644G-IBIwYdbBp6Zhc303bZS0m3-UAqsGU_Clk6d6ZMbPaOkdFEkvXiEDog2ITx.DX8twlxrldJPeFiO?startTime=1621119553000Black, futurist, poet, dyke, hip-hop feminist, womanist: Porsha is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization. Olayiwola is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College. Porsha Olayiwola is the author of
i shimmer sometimes,
too, forthcoming with Button Poetry, and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry,
Leadbelly and
Olio.
Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The
Library Journal and
Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005”.
Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001
Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as
Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry,
Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century,
Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art,
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam,
Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and
Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.
Naomi Shihab Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). She has received a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets; the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award; the Paterson Poetry Prize; four Pushcart Prizes; the Robert Creeley Prize; “The Betty Prize” from Poets House, for service to poetry; and numerous honors for her children’s literature, including two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. In 2011 Nye won the Golden Rose Award given by the New England Poetry Club, the oldest poetry reading series in the country. Her collection,
19 Varieties of Gazelle, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has been presented on National Public Radio on
A Prairie Home Companion and
The Writer’s Almanac. She has been featured on two PBS poetry specials including "The Language of Life" with Bill Moyers and also appeared on
NOW with Bill Moyers. She has been affiliated with The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin for 20 years and has been the poetry editor at The Texas Observer for 20 years. In 2019-2020 she was the editor for
New York Times Magazine poems. She is Chancellor Emeritus for the Academy of American Poets, a laureate of the 2013 NSK Neustadt Award for Children’s Literature, and in 2017 the American Library Association presented Naomi Shihab Nye with the 2018 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award. In 2018 the Texas Institute of Letters awarded her the Lon Tinkle Award for Lifetime Achievement. She was named the 2019-2021 Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. In 2020 she was awarded the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement by the National Book Critics Circle. Nye is a professor of Creative Writing - Poetry at Texas State University.
As the oldest continuous all-poetry bookstore in the country, The Grolier Poetry Book Shop has been a treasured gathering hub for local and internationally renowned poets since 1927. Visit us online or in the heart of Harvard Square where we continue to sell books and host live poetry readings.
GrolierPoetryBookshop.org
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