National Book Award finalist Danez Smith celebrates the release of their new collection Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf 2017), with a conversation with Saeed Jones (BuzzFeed, author of Prelude to Bruise). A book signing and reception will follow.
Saeed Jones' debut poetry collection Prelude To Bruise (Coffee House Press) was the winner of the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award For Poetry and the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection was also a finalist for 2015 awards from the Lambda Literary and the Publishing Triangle. Mr. Jones also won a Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2013 and 2016. His poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times, NPR, and Best American Poetry, among others. The Advocate Magazine recently named him as one of the "50 Most Influential LGBT People in Media." His memoir, How We Fight For Our Lives, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in 2018.
Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Don't Call Us Dead (2017), [insert] Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), and elsewhere. They are a founding member of the multigenre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. Their writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks. In poetry slam, Smith is a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club. In 2014 they were the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam, and were awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar.