Poetry & the Creative Mind 2022

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven collections of poetry, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Poets, 2018), which received the 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for poetry, and the 2020 Bobbitt Prize, was a finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, and the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn (Penguin Books, 2015), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), which won the National Book Award for Poetry; Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006); Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Pegasus Award for poetry criticism, and three Best American Poetry selections, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2014, he was named the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

He was elected to the Academy of American Poets’ Board of Chancellors in 2017 and serves as an ex officio member of the Academy’s Board of Directors. In 2022, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently a professor of English at New York University and resides in New York City.

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Debra Monk

Emmy, Tony, Obie, and Drama Desk Award-winner Debra Monk currently appears on HBO’s The Gilded Age and NBC’s New Amsterdam. She has recently appeared on film in Standing Up Falling Down, Demolition, and This Is Where I Leave You. Previous films include One For the Money; The Savages; Palindromes; Center Stage; The Devil’s Advocate; In & Out; Extreme Measures; The Bridges of Madison County; Jeffrey; and Fearless.

Her television roles include Mozart in the Jungle; Tell Me a Story; Diet Land; Mr. Mercedes; Grey’s Anatomy; Damages; Girls; and White Collar. She was seen in the TV movies Good Luck, Charlie: It’s Christmas!; The Music Man; Eloise at the Plaza; Eloise at Christmastime; Ellen Foster; and Redwood Curtain, reviving her Tony-winning performance.

She has appeared on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Curtains; Chicago; Reckless; Thou Shalt Not; Ah, Wilderness!; Steel Pier; Company; Picnic; Redwood Curtain; and Pump Boys and Dinettes (for which she was also a coauthor), collectively earning her four Tony Award nominations, one Tony Award, and one Drama Desk Award.

Monk won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Katie Sipowicz on NYPD Blue.

Dr. Saad Omer

Saad B. Omer is the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health and a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Yale University, Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He has conducted studies in the United States, Guatemala, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and South Africa. Dr Omer’s research portfolio includes epidemiology of respiratory viruses such as influenza, RSV, and—more recently—SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19); clinical trials to estimate efficacy of maternal and/or infant influenza, pertussis, polio, measles, and pneumococcal vaccines; and trials to evaluate drug regimens to reduce mother-to-child transmission of HIV. He has published over 400 papers in peer reviewed journals and has mentored over one hundred junior faculty, clinical and research postdoctoral fellows, and PhD and other graduate students. He has written on public health-related topics in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times and other publications.

Rosanne Cash

One of the country’s preeminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released fifteen albums of extraordinary songs that have earned her four Grammy Awards and twelve additional nominations.

Cash is also the author of four books, including the best-selling memoir Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read.” Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Oxford American, and The Nation, among other publications.

In addition to regular touring, Cash has partnered in programming collaborations with Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the Library of Congress. In 2012 Cash was awarded the SAG/AFTRA Lifetime Achievement Award for Sound Recordings and in 2014 received the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award in the Performing Arts. Cash is one of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2018 Cash was awarded the “Spirit of Americana” Free Speech Award by the Americana Music Association and received an honorary doctorate degree from the Berklee College of Music. In 2021 Cash became the first woman composer to receive the Edward MacDowell Medal. She is currently artist-in-residence at New York University

Jack Gilpin

Jack Gilpin can currently be seen in the role of Church in the HBO series The Gilded Age. His other television work includes his portrayals of the characters Sean Ayles on the Showtime series Billions and defense attorney Jeff Axtell on Law & Order.

He has performed on, off-, and off-off-Broadway, originating roles in plays by A. R. Gurney, Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein, Tina Howe, Shel Silverstein, Ken Ludwig, Romulus Linney, Paul Rudnick, John Ford Noonan, Peter Parnell, and many others. He has played leading roles in most of the major regional theaters around the country.

Gilpin has acted in numerous feature films, including Adventureland, 21, Quiz Show, The Juror, Something Wild, Heartburn, She-Devil, Reversal of Fortune, and Funny Farm.

He is an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church, most recently Rector of St. John’s, New Milford, Connecticut.

David Banks

David C. Banks is Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the largest school system in the nation. He is the former president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation and the founding principal of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, the first school in a network of innovative all-boys public schools in New York City and Newark, New Jersey.

Banks is a lifelong New Yorker born in Brooklyn and a proud graduate of New York City public schools, having attended P.S. 161 in Brooklyn and Hillcrest High School in Queens. David’s vision of education emphasizes a partnership between schools and communities based on the guiding principles of academic excellence, leadership, and character development.

Banks is a cofounder of Black EdFluencers United and has also served as a member of the board of directors of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition, as cochair of New York City Young Men’s Initiative, and as a founding board member of the Coalition of Schools Educating Boys of Color.

Banks is a graduate of Rutgers University and received his Juris Doctorate from St. John’s University School of Law. Banks lives in New York City and has four adult children and three granddaughters

Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco is the education ambassador of the Academy of American Poets. In his role, he helps champion the organization’s free resources for teachers, student projects, and other education initiatives.

He is the author of the poetry collections How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019); Directions to the Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2005), winner of the 2006 PEN/American Center Beyond Margins Award; and City of a Hundred Fires (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), winner of the 1997 Agnes Lynch Starrett National Poetry Prize, among others.

He is also the author of a memoir, The Prince of los Cocuyos (Ecco Press, 2014), a Lambda Literary Award-winning account of his childhood, adolescence, and coming to terms with his sexual, national, and cultural identities; and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey (Beacon Press, 2013). His inaugural poem, “One Today,” was also published as a children’s book illustrated by Dav Pilkey (Little, Brown, and Company, 2015).

Blanco has taught at various schools, including American University, Georgetown University, and Wesleyan University, and has been an artist in residence at Colby College’s Lunder Institute for American Art. He is currently a distinguished visiting professor at Florida International University

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Ann Dowd

Ann Dowd has been gracing the stage and screen for more than thirty years and was the recipient of the 2017 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her performance as Aunt Lydia on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel. For her work on the show, which will enter its fourth season this year, Dowd has also won a Critics’ Choice Award and was nominated for a Golden Globe award and multiple Screen Actors Guild awards.

On the big screen, Dowd was most recently seen in Fran Kranz’ acclaimed film Mass for which she has received critical recognition and awards, including BAFTA and Critics Choice nominations for Best Supporting Actress in addition to many other regional critics prizes and acknowledgments.

Other notable TV roles include the award-winning Foxtel series Lambs of God, Olive Kitteridge, recurring roles on Good Behavior, Masters of Sex, Quarry, Nothing Sacred, Judging Amy, Third Watch, Freaks and Geeks, and memorable appearances on At Home with Amy Sedaris, True Detective, Louie, Girls, House, Chicago Hope, The X-Files, and NYPD Blue. She has portrayed nine different characters in the Law & Order franchise.

On the stage, Dowd has appeared on Broadway in The Seagull with Kristen Scott Thomas and Carey Mulligan, Taking Sides with Elizabeth Marvel, and Candida alongside Mary Steenburgen, as well as in notable off-Broadway productions including The Normal Heart, Doubt, and Blood from a Stone.

Gregory Gourdet

Chef Gregory Gourdet is a culinary mastermind from Portland, Oregon. His first restaurant, Kann, is inspired by his Haitian heritage and will open in June 2022.

Gourdet spent ten years as executive chef and culinary director for Departure Restaurant + Lounge, where he paired local ingredients with the bold flavors of Japan, China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Korea to create modern Asian fare. A native New Yorker, Gourdet honed his culinary skills within celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant empire.

In 2013 he was named Chef of the Year by the Oregon Department of Agriculture and was Eater Portland’s Chef of the Year in 2014. In 2015 he earned runner up in Bravo’s Top Chef Season 12. He was thrice named a semifinalist by the James Beard Foundation for Best Chef: Northwest and was a finalist for the award in 2020. He was a finalist on Top Chef: All Stars Season 17 and was a judge on 2021’s Top Chef: Portland.

His first cookbook, Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, released in May 2021, is the ultimate guide to cooking globally-inspired dishes free of gluten, dairy, soy, legumes, and grains.

Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting premodern and classical Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. By bringing traditional and historical practice into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent and investigative work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in western art history. Interrogating ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through imperial and feminist perspectives, Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics, and sculpture explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories.

Sikander earned a BFA from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and an MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the State Department Medal of Arts, Sikander’s innovative work has been exhibited and collected internationally. Her exhibition “Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities,” an examination of her work from 1987 to 2003, is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Ishmael Beah

Ishmael Beah, born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and Radiance of Tomorrow: A Novel, both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

His newest novel, Little Family, is a profound and tender portrayal of the connections we forge to survive the fates we’re dealt. Radiance of Tomorrow, written with the gentle lyricism of a dream and the moral clarity of a fable, is a powerful book about preserving what means the most to us, even in uncertain times.

His Memoir, A Long Way Gone, has been published in over forty languages and was nominated for a Quill Award in the Best Debut Author category for 2007. Time magazine named the book as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2007, ranking at number three.

His work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Time magazine, the International Herald Tribune, Globe & Mail, LIT, the Guardian, Parabola, and numerous academic journals.

He is based in Freetown, Sierra Leone with his partner, Priscillia, and their three children

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo was appointed as the United States poet laureate in June 2019 and is the first Native American poet laureate in the history of the position. She is the author of several books of poetry, including An American Sunrise (W. W. Norton, 2019); The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (W. W. Norton, 1994), which received the Oklahoma Book Arts Award; and In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), which received an American Book Award and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her memoir Crazy Brave (W. W. Norton, 2012) won the 2013 PEN Center USA literary award for creative nonfiction. Harjo has also published collections of interviews and conversations, children’s books, and collaborative art texts.

Her other honors include the 2019 Jackson Poetry Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award, The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, and the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award in poetry. She has also received fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts

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Bill T. Jones

Bill T. Jones is the cofounder and artistic director/choreographer of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and artistic director of New York Live Arts. He was the associate artist of the 2020 Holland Festival and is a recipient of the 2014 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, the 2013 National Medal of Arts, the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors, a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!, a 2007 Tony Award, a 2007 Obie Award, and the 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Callaway Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening, among other awards. In 2005 he received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement, and in 1994 he was the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship.

In 2010 Mr. Jones was recognized as Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000 The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

Sharon Van Etten

Sharon Van Etten is a songwriter, musician, performer, and actress. Van Etten released her fifth full-length album, Remind Me Tomorrow, in 2019. The album was featured prominently by NPR Music, Billboard, Fresh Air, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Esquire, and the New Yorker, among others. In support of the release Van Etten played the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Austin City Limits, and the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Last year Van Etten celebrated the 10th anniversary of her second album epic with epic Ten, featuring covers by Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, Big Red Machine, Shamir, and more. She also collaborated with Angel Olsen on “Like I Used To,” one of 2021’s most praised singles. This year will see the release of her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong.

Van Etten was a guest star in the Netflix series The OA and in Eliza Hittman’s Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always. She performed in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Off-screen, she wrote her first score for Katherine Dieckmann’s movie Strange Weather and the closing title song for Tig Notaro’s show, Tig. Most recently, she appeared in How It Ends, which also featured two songs by Van Etten.

Willem Dafoe

Having made well over one hundred films in his legendary career, Willem Dafoe is internationally respected for bringing versatility and boldness to some of the most iconic movies of our time. His artistic curiosity for the human condition leads him all over the world to projects large and small, Hollywood films as well as independent cinema.

Dafoe has been recognized with four Academy Award nominations: three Best Actor in a Supporting Role nominations and a Best Leading Actor nomination for Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate, for which he also received a Golden Globe nomination. He has also received awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review as well as the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He is the recipient of two Independent Spirit Awards, the Venice Film Festival Volpi Cup, and a Berlinale Honorary Golden Bear for Lifetime Achievement.

Dafoe is one of the founding members of the Wooster Group, a New York-based experimental theater collective. He created and performed in all of the group’s work from 1977 through 2005, both in the U.S. and internationally. He and his wife, director Giada Colagrande, have made three films together: Padre, A Woman, and Before It Had a Name.

Claire Danes

Clare Danes is the recipient of three Primetime Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Danes gained early recognition as Angela Chase in the 1994 teen drama series My So-Called Life. The role won her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and she made her film debut the same year in Little Women.

Her other films include Home for the Holidays, Romeo + Juliet, The Rainmaker, Les Misérables, Brokedown Palace, The Hours, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Shopgirl, Stardust, and A Kid Like Jake.

From 2011 to 2020 she starred as Carrie Mathison in the Showtime drama series Homeland, for which she won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress – Television Series Drama, and the Television Critics Association Award for Individual Achievement in Drama. In 2012 Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world, and she was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015.

Special Thanks

Readers

David Banks
Ishmael Beah
Richard Blanco
Rosanne Cash
Willem Dafoe
Claire Danes
Ann Dowd
Jack Gilpin
Gregory Gourdet
Terrance Hayes
Joy Harjo
Bill T. Jones
Debra Monk
Dr. Saad Omer
Shahzia Sikander
Sharon Van Etten

Executive Producers

Lawrence Berger and Anouk Markovits
John and Susan Jackson
Tess O’Dwyer
Eunice Panetta
Dr. Andrew Schiff and Alexandra Wolfe Schiff

Producers

Priscilla Bender
Penn and Diane Holsenbeck
Ian Kennedy
Eric Rayman

Associate Producers

Booksore1Sarasota and PoetryLife Festival
Margaret H. Douglas-Hamilton
Alexandra Jackson
Michael Jacobs and Sheridan Hay
Elizabeth Sobol
Eric and Elizabeth Warren

With additional support from

Kevin Ahern, Anonymous, Stephen Avery, Elizabeth Bailey, Elia J. Barbati, John Benka, Agnes Bourne, Michael A. Boyd, Marilyn Berg Callander, Elisabeth Carter, Ed.M., MFA, Patricia Clark, Patricia Creegan, Mary Dorman, Diane Faissler, W Jay Fellows, Judith M. Ford, Linda Nemec Foster, Marian Gardner, Timothy Gyves, James Richard Hansen, David Hariton, Helen Houghton, Marilyn Kallet, Camille Lannan, James P. Lenfestey, Ina Leonard, Bia Lowe, Carolyn Masters, Jessica McKeon, John Moore, Bruno Navasky and Melissa Ozawa, Kaye Newbury, Gwenn A. Nusbaum, Dr. Phillip Periman, Poetry Matters Project, James Putnam, Leslie Roach, Margaret Roark, Elda Rotor, Katie Sammons, John Shannon and Jan Serr, Andrew Smulian, Valerie Sopher, Diana Stark, Rose Styron, Caroline Thurston, Patricia Towers, Nicholas Vergoth, Dr. Elizabeth Wade, Margaret E. Wagner, Arete Warren, Mariquita West M.D., and Holly Ulmer York

Publishers Circle

W. W. Norton and Co.
ABRAMS Books
Andrews McMeel
Penguin Random House

Poetry & the Creative Mind 2022

Opening Remarks

Terrance Hayes

Honored Readers

Debra Monk

Dr. Saad Omer

Rosanne Cash

Jack Gilpin

David Banks

A brief look at the 26 years of National Poetry Month and the Academy of American Poets featuring Richard Blanco and Jen Benka.

Richard Blanco

Ann Dowd

Gregory Gourdet

Shahzia Sikander

Ishmael Beah

Board Chair Tess O’Dwyer presents the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award to Joy Harjo, in recognition of her important contributions to American poetry.

Joy Harjo

Bill T. Jones

Sharon Van Etten

Remarks

Willem Dafoe

Claire Danes

Terrance Hayes

Debra Monk

Dr. Saad Omer

Rosanne Cash

Jack Gilpin

David Banks

Richard Blanco

Ann Dowd

Gregory Gourdet

Shahzia Sikander

Ishmael Beah

Joy Harjo

Bill T. Jones

Sharon Van Etten

Willem Dafoe

Claire Danes

Poetry & the Creative Mind 2022

Page submenu block

Opening Remarks

Honored Readers

A brief look at the 26 years of National Poetry Month and the Academy of American Poets featuring Richard Blanco and Jen Benka.

Board Chair Tess O’Dwyer presents the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award to Joy Harjo, in recognition of her important contributions to American poetry.

Remarks

Terrance Hayes

Debra Monk

Dr. Saad Omer

Rosanne Cash

Jack Gilpin

David Banks

Richard Blanco

Ann Dowd

Gregory Gourdet

Shahzia Sikander

Ishmael Beah

Joy Harjo

Bill T. Jones

Sharon Van Etten

Willem Dafoe

Claire Danes

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