Join NYU's Global Center for Academic and Spiritual Life for a tribute reading in honor of Larry Levis, celebrating the publication of Swirl & Vortex: Collected Poems, by Larry Levis, edited by David St. John (Graywolf Press, February 2026) featuring Catherine Barnett, Terrance Hayes, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, John Murillo, and David St. John.
Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (2024 Graywolf Press); Human Hours (2018 Believer Book Award, New York Times "Best Poetry of 2018" selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim fellow and Whiting Award recipient, she was recently honored with a 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Nation, Harper’s, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. She's been a visiting professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College, Barnard College, and Princeton University. She currently teaches in NYU's MFA Program and works as an independent editor.
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include a collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, which were published by Penguin in 2023. His other works include: American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University.
Edward Hirsch, a Chicago native and MacArthur Fellow, is a celebrated poet and tireless advocate for poetry. He has published ten books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son, and Stranger by Night. He has also published eight books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, and The Heart of American Poetry. His new book, a stand-up comedy and Skokie elegy, is a startling memoir, My Childhood in Pieces. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the National Jewish Book Award. He taught at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Since 2003, he has been president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.
Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems, ( W.W. Norton 2024.) which includes poems from her four previous books.
From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State. She is the poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Believer Poetry Award, Maya Angelou Book Award, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Murillo’s poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. Currently, he is an associate professor of English and teaches at Hunter College.
David St. John was born in Fresno, California, on July 24, 1949. He received his BA in 1974 from California State University, Fresno, and an MFA from the University of Iowa.
St. John’s many books of poetry include The Last Troubadour (Ecco, 2017); The Window (Arctos Press, 2014); The Auroras (HarperCollins, 2012); The Face: A Novella in Verse (HarperPerennial, 2005); Prism (Arctos Press, 2002); The Red Leaves of Night (HarperCollins, 1999); and Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems (HarperPerennial, 1994), which was nominated for the National Book Award.
St. John is also the author of the volume of essays and interviews Where the Angels Come Toward Us (White Pine Press, 1995) and coeditor, with Cole Swenson, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2009). He is also the author of two libretti: one for Donald Crockett’s opera The Face, which is based on St. John’s book of the same name, and one for Frank Ticheli’s choral symphony The Shore.