The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series
February 18, 2024
Major Jackson
Major Jackson is an award-winning poet and host of the podcast “The Slowdown.” He also serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review and is the author of six books of poetry, including “Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems” (2023), “The Absurd Man” (2020), “Roll Deep” (2015), “Holding Company” (2010), “Hoops” (2006) and “Leaving Saturn” (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include “Best American Poetry 2019,” “Renga for Obama,” and Library of America’s “Countee Cullen: Collected Poems.” He is also the author of “A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson” edited by Amor Kohli.
February 11, 2023
Ada Limón
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.
Ada Limón Poetry Reading at Emory
March 13, 2023
Marilyn Chin
Marilyn Chin is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and presently serves as a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, Chin has written five collections of poetry, including “A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems” (2018). Her book “Hard Love Province” won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for poetry, which honors books that confront racism and examine diversity. She is also the author of the novel “Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen” (2009).
March 20, 2021
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States, is a member of the Muscogee Nation. She is only the second poet to be appointed a third term as U.S. Poet Laureate. Harjo is the author of ten books of poetry, including her most recent, Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (2022), the highly acclaimed An American Sunrise (2019), which was a 2020 Oklahoma Book Award Winner, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize and named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association, and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award.
February 22, 2020
Nikki Giovanni
Giovanni has written numerous poetry collections, beginning with her first self-published volume “Black Feeling, Black Talk” in 1968. She also has published several works of nonfiction, children’s literature and multiple recordings, including the Grammy-nominated “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection.” Her most recent publications include “Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid,” the children’s book of poetry “I Am Loved” and, as editor, “The 100 Best African American Poems.”
Among her numerous awards are the inaugural Rosa L. Parks Woman of Courage Award, the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Award, the Virginia Governor’s Award for the Arts and the Emily Couric Leadership Award. She is a seven-time recipient of the NAACP Image Award.
February 23, 2019
Richard Blanco
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco, was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY and THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.
February 17, 2018
Tracy K. Smith
Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, “Ordinary Light,” and three books of poetry. She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection “Life on Mars,” which also was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. The collection is partly a tribute to her late father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Telescope. “Duende” won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. “The Body’s Question” was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Tracy K. Smith Papers
November 10, 2017
Anne Waldman
Anne Waldman is a poet and writer and has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create. She is the author of more than 60 books and is the cofounder and Distinguished Professor of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
February 28, 2016
Rita Dove
Rita Dove served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Her books of poetry include Sonata Mulattica, American Smooth, On the Bus with Rosa Parks, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Thomas and Beulah, which won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She has received 25 honorary doctorates, including one from Emory University in 2013. Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1989.
February 21, 2015
Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy is the first female Poet Laureate of Great Britain and one of Britain’s best-known and most celebrated poets. She won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection of linked love poems, Rapture, and her other collections include Standing Female Nude, winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award, Selling Manhattan, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, and Mean Time, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her most recent book, The Bees, was awarded Britain’s prestigious Costa Award for Poetry. The Bees and Rapture were released in the US in 2013. Duffy is also a playwright-Take My Husband, Cavern of Dreams, Little Women, Big Boys, Loss, and Casanova have been performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London.
October 1, 2015
Charles Wright
Charles Wright was born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee on August 25, 1935. He is the author of 24 poetry collections, including Caribou (2014), which Publishers Weekly calls “a dexterous balance of lightness in dark… rife with nihilism, humor, and beauty.” Wright’s many honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize in Poetry from the Library of Congress. Wright served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2015.
October 2, 2014
A Tribute to Seamus Heaney
An evening of poetry and song in honor of the late Seamus Heaney. The Nobel Laureate, whose papers are housed at Emory’s Manuscript and Rare Books Library, was a longtime friend of the series, appearing as a reader only months before his death. The program included readings and remembrances by William Corbett, Vona Groarke, Belinda McKeon, Nick Laird, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young. In addition, the Vega Quartet, joined by pianist Tim Whitehead and soprano Wanda Yang Temko, performed a series of musical compositions based on Heaney’s work.
An evening of poetry and song in honor of the late Seamus Heaney. The Nobel Laureate, whose papers are housed at Emory’s Manuscript and Rare Books Library, was a longtime friend of the series, appearing as a reader only months before his death. The program included readings and remembrances by William Corbett, Vona Groarke, Belinda McKeon, Nick Laird, Tracy K. Smith, Natasha Trethewey, and Kevin Young. In addition, the Vega Quartet, joined by pianist Tim Whitehead and soprano Wanda Yang Temko, performed a series of musical compositions based on Heaney’s work.
October 2, 2014
Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New Hampshire and in New York City.
February 22, 2014
Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. The author of over thirty books of poetry, Muldoon’s most acclaimed collections include New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry.
May 6, 2014
W.S. Merwin
Appointed United States Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress in 2010, William Stanley Merwin has a career that has spanned six decades. A poet, translator, gardener and environmental activist, Merwin has become one of the most widely read and honored poets in America. Merwin is the author of over fifty books of poetry, translation, and prose. His collections include Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001 (2005), which won the National Book Award, and The Shadow of Sirius (2008), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (his second Pulitzer). His other accolades include the Bollingen Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Lilly Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress.
February 5, 2013
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past." Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.
In 1988, Seamus Heaney was invited to give the inaugural The Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, later published as The Place of Writing. This event launched an era of public scholarship and deep friendship between the University and the poet that contributed to his decision in 2003 to place a portion of his papers at Emory.
August 31, 2012
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She is the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work (2000); Bellocq's Ophelia (2002); Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall (2012). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
April 11, 2012
Don Paterson
Don Paterson is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Rain (Faber, 2009; FSG, 2010). He has published two books of aphorism and a compendium, Best Thought, Worst Thought (Graywolf, 2008). He has also edited a number of anthologies. His poetry has won a number of awards, including the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Whitbread Poetry Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, and the T S Eliot Prize on two occasions. Rain won the 2009 Forward prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association; he received the OBE in 2008 and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010.
March 22, 2012
Linda Gregerson
A 2007 National Book Award finalist and recent Guggenheim Fellow, Linda Gregerson is the Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, where she teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature. She is the author of five books of poetry—including The Selvage (2012)—two books of criticism, and the co-editor of one collection of scholarly essays. Among her honors and awards are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Kingsley Tufts Award, four Pushcart Prizes, grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Bogliasco Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Humanities Center.
January 29, 2012
Billy Collins
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. The author of eight collections, most recently Horoscopes for the Dead (2011), he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry.
October 26, 2011
D.A. Powell
Born in Albany, Georgia, D. A. Powell is the author of four poetry collections: Tea (1998); Lunch (2000); Cocktails (2004); and Chronic (2009), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize. Twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, he has received a Pushcart Prize and the California Book Award. His collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys was published in February 2012.
March 29, 2011
Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady
Toi Derricotte has published four books of poems, including the award-winning collection, Tender. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Cornelius Eady, a distinguished poet and playwright whose work is often evocative of blues and jazz, has been honored with fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Hardheaded Weather.
Derricotte and Eady are co-founders of Cave Canem, a nation organization for African American poetry and poets.
March 2, 2011
Michael Dickman and Michael Dickman
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem, winner of the 2009 Oregon Book Award for Poetry and the APR/Honnickman First Book Prize. His poems plum the ecstatic nature of life, where pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand. Michael Dickman, author of The End of the West, writes poems that document the bright desires and all-too-common sufferings of modern times. His many honors include a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and the James Laughlin Award for his collection Flies (2011).
January 30, 2011
Mary Oliver
One of the country’s most beloved poets, Mary Oliver is known for her lyrical connection to nature and for evocative and precise imagery. She has received countless distinctions, including the Pulitzer Prize (for American Primitive), the National Book Award for Poetry (for New and Selected Poems), the Lannan Foundation Literary award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award. Her latest book is Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010).
April 6, 2010
Eman Grennan
Eamon Grennan’s books include Matter of Fact (2008); The Quick of It (2005); Still Life with Waterfall (2001), the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Poets; and Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998). His Out of Sight: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming later this year. Grennan’s Leopardi: Selected Poems (1997) earned the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is also the author of a collection of essays entitled Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century (1999). Grennan is a native of Dublin and divides his time between the U.S. and the west of Ireland.
January 30, 2010
Robert Pinsky
Former Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Gulf Music (2007) and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, which received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union. In 2009, Pinsky published Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud. Pinsky’s best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. Pinsky is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on television’s The Simpsons.
Robert Pinsky Poetry Reading at Emory
November 10, 2009
C.K. Williams
C. K. Williams is known for his daring formal style, which combines everyday observations with long, Whitmanesque lines. He has authored ten books of poetry, including Collected Poems (2006); The Singing (2003), winner of the National Book Award; Repair (2003), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Flesh and Blood (1987), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Williams has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Twentieth Annual Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an honor given to an American poet in recognition of extraordinary accomplishment.
April 7, 2009
Li-Young Lee
Award-winning poet Li-Young Lee is the author of five critically acclaimed books, including Behind My Eyes (2008). His earlier poetry collections are Book of My Nights (2001); Rose (1986), winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University; The City in which I Love You (1991), the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and the memoir The Winged Seed (1995) which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee's other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as a Whiting Award.
March 18, 2009
Campbell McGrath
Campbell McGrath is a prize-winning and popular poet whose work explores the cultural and natural landscapes of the United States. McGrath’s awards include the Kingsley Tufts Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and a 1999 MacArthur “Genius Grant.” McGrath’s latest poetry collection is Seven Notebooks (2008); his previous collections include Florida Poems (2002), Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), American Noise (1993) and Capitalism (1990). McGrath currently teaches at Florida International University in Miami where he is Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.
February 11, 2009
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. She is the author of four books of poems, including The Venus Hottentot, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has received many grants and honors, including the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship and the 2007 Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets & Writers. She is a professor at Yale University, and was recently named the Inaugural Poet, only the fourth poet asked to read at a presidential inauguration.
October 16, 2007
Sonia Sanchez
Sanchez has won the American Book Award and the Robert Frost Medal and held a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Influenced by jazz, the blues and the oral tradition, Sanchez’s poetry readings and performances have inspired generations of poets and audiences alike. A founder of the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez is the author of more than 16 books. Does Your House Have Lions? was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award.
April 5, 2007
Galway Kinell
American poet Galway Kinnell’s writing career spans more than five decades. In 1983 he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Selected Poems (1982). His other volumes of poetry include: The New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980); and Body Rags (1968). In 2002 he was awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America.
February 28, 2007
Rita Dove
As a college student, Rita Dove held a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany. She has published numerous poetry collections, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the Royal National Theatre in London. Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received many literary honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Raymond Danowski Poetry Library contains rare and first editions of her published work.
April 27, 2006
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She is the nineteenth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of four collections of poetry, Domestic Work (2000); Bellocq's Ophelia (2002); Native Guard (2006)—for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize—and Thrall (2012). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
March 8, 2006
Lucille Clifton
At 16, Lucille Clifton entered college early, matriculating as a drama major at Howard University. In 1969, poet Robert Hayden entered her poems into competition for the YW-YMHA Poetry Center Discovery Award; she won the award and with it the publication of her first volume of poems, Good Times. Clifton served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1982, and in 2000 she won the National Book Award for her selected poems, Blessing the Boats. Her papers were acquired by Emory in 2006. In addition, the Rose Library obtained Lucille Clifton’s personal library, now part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.
November 2, 2005
Simon Armitage
Born in West Yorkshire, England, Simon Armitage has a degree in social work and worked as a probation officer in Manchester, England in the 1980s. Armitage is known for his distinctly northern British vernacular and dry wit; in Contemporary Poets, Brian Macaskill notes that Armitage’s poetry brings to mind “Philip Larkin’s late-career use of vernacular, slang locutions, and telling obscenities, Armitage often turns the commonplace or, especially, the vulgar phrase to epigrammatic effect.” In 1999, the New Millennium Experience Company commissioned Armitage to write Killing Time in celebration of the new millennium.
September 8, 2005
Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the author of Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels; Dear Darkness; For the Confederate Dead; Book of Hours and the “film noir in verse” Black Maria. Young was a 1993 Nation Poetry Series winner for Most Way Home, a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets for To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Jelly Roll: A Blues. Young is also the author of a non-fiction book, The Grey Album, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the 2013 PEN Open Book Award. He is the editor of several collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink.