In-Person | Thursday | January 23 | 7-9pm
Rio Cortez, Marilyn Hacker, Robert Wood Lynn, and John Yau read from their highly acclaimed books in celebration of the 29th Poets House Showcase. This event is presented with generous support from the Battery Park City Authority.
Rio Cortez reads from Golden Ax (Penguin, 2022), Marilyn Hacker reads from Calligraphies (W.W. Norton, 2023), Robert Wood Lynn reads from Mothman Apologia (Yale, 2022), and John Yau reads from Tell It Slant (Omnidawn, 2023).
Readings in Kray Hall with a reception to follow.
By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by this Community Agreement. Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room.
About the poets:
Rio Cortez is the New York Times bestselling author of picture books for children, including The ABCs of Black History and The River is My Sea. Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax, was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award. Born and raised in Salt Lake City, UT, she now lives, works, and writes in Harlem, NY.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, including Calligraphies (W.W. Norton, 2023), Blazons (Carcanet 2019), and A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010). Her twenty-two translations of French and Francophone poets include Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s A Handful of Blue Earth (Liverpool, 2017) and Emmanuel Moses’ Preludes and Fugues (Oberlin, 2016). She received the 2009 American PEN Award for poetry in translation for Marie Etienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award, and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She also won the National Book Award for her collection of poems Presentation Piece (Penguin, 1974). Formerly she was an editor for the Kenyon Review. She lives in New York and Paris.
Robert Wood Lynn is a poet from Virginia. His first poetry collection, Mothman Apologia, was the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and listed as a best book of 2022 by multiple institutions, including The New York Times and The New York Public Library. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Poetry Daily, Poetry Magazine and other publications. A 2023 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, he splits his time between Rockbridge County, Virginia and New York City where he teaches poetry at Juilliard.
John Yau is a poet, critic, fiction writer, founder of Black Square Editions, and he is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic. His recent books of poems include Tell it Slant (University of Chicago, 2023) and Genghis Chan on Drums (Omnidawn, 2021). He has received awards and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Academy of American Poets, New York Foundation of the Arts, Ingram Merrill Foundation and the General Electric Foundation. He received the 2017 Jackson Award in Poetry. He is Professor of Critical Studies at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University) and lives in New York.