Conversations in Craft and Content

Conversations in Craft and Content

Check out Arizona State University’s new creative writing lecture series hosted and moderated by Mitchell Jackson, Guggenheim fellow, Pulitzer winner, and the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor of English at ASU. Join Jackson as he welcomes two-time National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward as the inaugural guest at this virtual event via Zoom on Friday, February 4, 2022, at 6 p.m AZ/MST.

Photo of Jesmyn Ward by Beowulf Sheehan

The Conversations in Craft and Content lecture series is free of charge and open to the public. Take advantage of this great opportunity to learn more about Jesym Ward’s craft including her writing and revision process, philosophies that guide her, and ideas about her work.

Learn more about the moderator, guest, and series on the Department of English’s website and register here!

#ArtLitPhx: Terrence Hayes Poetry Reading at Phoenix Art Museum

Friday, February, 5th at 7pm the Uni11896064_10154266775104896_6342325946509938126_nversity of Arizona Poetry Center, ASU Creative Writing, Superstition Review, and ASU: Performance in the Borderlands are co-sponsoring a reading by Terrance Hayes at the Phoenix Art Museum. The reading is open to the public, and more information can be found here.

Terrance Hayes, author of How to Be Drawn, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.

How to Be Drawn is Hayes’ fifth collection.. Founding editor of Superstition Review, Patricia Murphy says of reading the book, “I left feeling better informed about how others walk around in this world.”

How to Be Drawn is for everyone, it is a meditation on family, relationships, history, socioeconomic structure, and everything in between. Hayes writes very personal poems in his latest collection but manages to make them by some means ubiquitous and universal for his readers. The lines from the opening poem, “What It Look Like” read

 

“…don’t you lie/about who you are sometimes and then realize/the lie is true? You are blind to your power, Brother/Bastard like the king who wanders his kingdom searching for the king.”
Hayes keeps up the pace throughout, surprising the reader line by line, poem by poem.

–Eli Tubbs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind in a Box (Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.  How To Be Drawn (Penguin 2015), his most recent  collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2015 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.