TRACY K. SMITH is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as the 22nd poet laureate of the United States and is the author of five poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars.
As an invitation toward meaning and connection, National Book Award finalist and former Young People’s Poet Laureate Naomi Shihab Nye and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith will discuss how celebrations of joy, family, and poetry in their new books are fundamental to our capacities to love, dream, question, and cultivate community. In Grace Notes: Poems about Families, Nye celebrates family and community in her most personal work to date. With poems about her own childhood and school years, her parents and grandparents, and the people who have touched and shaped her life in so many ways, this is an emotional and sparkling collection to savor, share, and read again and again. Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as “inaccessible,” “irrelevant,” or “intimidating.” In Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, she lifts the veil on her own creative process, and shows us how reading and writing poetry allows us to better confront life’s many uncertainties and losses, build camaraderie with strangers, and understand ourselves more fully. By reimagining and reexamining the age-old art form, Fear Less is a warm invitation to find meaning, consolation, and hope through poetry for poetry fans and newcomers to the art form.
Moderated by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The New Economy.
Buy The New Economy – Calvocoressi
Buy Grace Notes: Poems about Families – Nye
Buy Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times – Smith
TRACY K. SMITH is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as the 22nd poet laureate of the United States and is the author of five poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE has written or edited more than 30 books – including her latest book, Grace Notes: Poems About Families – and has worked as a visiting writer all her life. She served as a “Young People’s” poet laureate of the United States and as the poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine and the Texas Observer. For I Know About a Thousand Things: The Writings of Ann Alejandro of Uvalde, Texas (Wittliff Collections Literary Series) (Texas A&M University Press), Nye collaborated with author and essayist Marion Winik.
GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: Poems; Apocalyptic Swing: Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Rocket Fantastic: Poems, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They are the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, Poetry, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. They are an editor-at-large at Los Angeles Review of Books and poetry editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a nonfiction book entitled The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022-2023. They teach at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and live in Old East Durham, North Carolina, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry is The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press).