Luther Hughes will be in conversation with author and poet Peter Conners, Publisher and Executive Director of BOA Editions.
A Shiver in the Leaves is stunningly cinematic in its layered portrayal of the never-ending dualities of a queer Black poet’s life in the city. Hughes’s interrogation of selfhood renders a sharply intimate and viscerally powerful reimagining of what it means to be alive in a body, and what it can mean to live.
“Luther Hughes’ debut poetry collection resounds with longing—for love, for tenderness, and most of all for mercy. Achingly vulnerable, A Shiver in the Leaves reminds us that ‘It’s never enough to love a thing, / you must do the work, too,’ and we hold some measure of our own salvation in our hands.” — Donika Kelly
Luther Hughes is the author of the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), recommended by the American Library Association. His writing has been published in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Seattle Times, Orion Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. The founder of Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization for queer writers of color, he co-hosts The Poet Salon podcast with Gabrielle Bates and Dujie Tahat and curates a monthly poetry newsletter called Lue’s Poetry Hour. He is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize.