The Blaney Lecture
The Blaney Lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics is offered annually in New York City by a prominent poet. Past lectures have been given by Elizabeth Alexander, Richard Blanco, Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, Joy Harjo, Terrance Hayes, Susan Howe, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, and Claudia Rankine. The lecture was created in memory of former Academy of American Poets Board member Dr. Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney, past president of Cedar Crest College and champion of women and education, by a gift from her estate.
On Thursday, February 11, 2021, at 7 p.m. EST, Adrian Matejka delivered the 2020 - 2021 Blaney Lecture. Matejka is author of the graphic novel Last On His Feet (Liveright, 2021) and the poetry collection Map to the Stars (Penguin Books, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, and a 2019 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.
Past Blaney Lectures
Adrian Matejka, Let’s Stay Together: Notes About Black Poetry & Community, 2020 - 2021
Terrance Hayes, Survey of an American Century, 2019
Alicia Ostriker, Containing Multitude: Poetry and the City, 2018
Claudia Rankine, 2017
Sharon Olds, Favorite Moments in Poems from Chaucer to Clifton, 2016
Joy Harjo, Ancestors: A Mapping of Indigeneous Poetry & Poets, 2015
Richard Blanco, On Becoming A Presidential Inaugural Poet, 2014
Carolyn Forché, Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness, 2013
Elizabeth Alexander, Rethinking Lucille Clifton, 2012
Susan Howe, The Whispered Rush, Telepathy of Archives, 2011
Anne Carson, 2010
