Poets Catherine Barnett and Lillian-Yvonne Bertram read from their poetry collections Human Hours and Travesty Generator, followed by a public Q&A.
Catherine Barnett is the author of three books of poetry, Human Hours (Graywolf, 2018), winner of the Believer Book Award); The Game of Boxes (Graywolf, 2012), winner of the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award for Best Second Book; and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James, 2004). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and The Washington Post. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award, she is a Distinguished Writing Fellow at Hunter College, and also teaches at Barnard College and NYU.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is the author of four books of poetry: Travesty Generator (Noemi Press, 2019) which was long-listed for the National Book Award and received the Poetry Society of America’s Anna Rabinowitz Prize for Interdisciplinary Work; Personal Science (Tupelo, 2017); a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen, 2016); and But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise (Red Hen, 2012), a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for outstanding works of literature published by people of African descent. The recipient of an NEA fellowship and director of the Chautauqua Institution Writers’ Festival, they are an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where they direct the MFA program in creative writing.