The Academy of American Poets presents a virtual reading with 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award winner Kemi Alabi, Meg Day, and previous Chancellor Arthur Sze as part of the 2022 AWP Conference & Bookfair: https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/event_detail/21663
PLEASE NOTE: To access this event and all other virtual AWP events, you can purchase a virtual-only registration to the #AWP22 conference, which is $175 for non-AWP-members and $100 for AWP members before February 10. Or, you can purchase an in-person registration ($295 for non-AWP members and $195 for AWP members before February 10), which will guarantee your access to all in-person and virtual events, including our March 25 reading. After February 10, the early bird pricing will end and prices will go up. Learn more about pricing and registration here: https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/registration_overview
Born in Wisconsin in 1990, Kemi Alabi earned their BA in Philosophy and Political Science from Boston University. Their first full-length poetry collection, Against Heaven, was selected by Claudia Rankine to receive the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award and will be published by Graywolf Press in 2022. The coeditor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021), Alabi organizes narrative power campaigns and projects, most recently as cultural strategy director of Forward Together. They live in Chicago.
Meg Day grew up in California’s Bay Area and received a BA from the University of California–San Diego, an MFA from Mills College, and a PhD from the University of Utah, where they were a Steffensen-Cannon Fellow and poetry editor for Quarterly West. They are the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award and finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. They are also co-editor, with Niki Herd, of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, published in 2019 as a part of The Unsung Masters Series through Pleaides Press. Day has received awards and fellowships from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the Lambda Literary Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, Hedgebrook, the International Queer Arts Festival, and others. They were the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for January 2020 and teach at Franklin & Marshall College. Day lives in Pennsylvania.
Born in New York City in 1950, Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); Sight Lines (Coper Canyon Press, 2019), which received the 2019 National Book Award in poetry; Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); and The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). Sze was elected to the American Academy of Arts And Sciences in 2017 and served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives. In December 2022, Sze will be guest editor of the Poem-a-Day series.