Guides: Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) & the ULS Collection: An Evening with Terrance Hayes and Rickey Laurentiis

January 24, 2019 Event - An Evening with Terrance Hayes and Rickey Laurentiis

Terrance Hayes and Rickey Laurentiis: Reading and Conversation

January 24, 2019 @ 7:00pm | Heinz Memorial Chapel

Registration is not required. Just show up! Arrive early to get a good seat.

Location and Address

University of Pittsburgh
Heinz Memorial Chapel
S Bellefield Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Homewood Cultural Engagement Center: Terrance Hayes' Community Workshop

January 25, 2019 - 6:00pm

Terrance Hayes leads a community workshop in the historic African American neighborhood of Homewood in Pittsburgh.

Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1971, and educated at Coker College where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Hayes taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before becoming a Professor of English at New York University.

Hayes served as the 2017-2018 poetry editor for New York Times Magazine. He was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner, 2014), the preeminent annual anthology of contemporary American poetry. His poems have appeared in ten editions of the series.

His first book, Muscular Music, won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Lighthead, was winner of the 2010 National Book Award.

His most recent manuscripts are 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).

Rickey Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to love the dark. Their poetry has been supported by several foundations and fellowships, including the Whiting Foundation (2018), Lannan Literary Foundation (2017), Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy (2014), Poetry International Rotterdam (2014), the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), Cave Canem Foundation (2009-2011), and the Poetry Foundation, which awarded him a Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2012. In 2016, they traveled to Palestine as an invited reader for the Palestine Festival of Literature. Laurentiis received a MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where he was a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and a Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where they read literature and queer theory.

Boy with Thorn by Rickey Laurentiis
Call Number: PS3612.A9442285 A6 2015
Publication Date: 2015
Winner of the 2016 Levis Reading Prize; Winner of the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Rickey Luarentiis is a winner of a 2018 Whiting Writers Prize. In a landscape at once the brutal American South as it is the brutal mind, Boy with Thorn interrogates the genesis of all poetic creation--the imagination itself, questioning what role it plays in both our fascinations with and repulsion from a national history of racial and sexual violence. The personal and political crash into one language here, gothic as it is supple, meditating on visual art and myth, to desire, the practice of lynching and Hurricane Katrina. Always at its center, though, is the poet himself--confessing a double song of pleasure and inevitable pain. Item number: 31735047425560
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3558.A8378 A6 2018
Publication Date: 2018
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered - the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning. Item number: 31735072310448
To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3561.N45 Z55 2018
Publication Date: 2018
In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation "as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself." Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet's search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America. The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can't really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Item number: 31735066805098
How to Be Drawn by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3558.A8378 A6 2015
Publication Date: 2015
A finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In How to Be Drawn, Terrance Hayes explores how we see and are seen. While many of these poems bear the clearest imprint yet of Hayes's background as a visual artist, they do not strive to describe art so much as inhabit it. Thus, one poem contemplates the principle of blind contour drawing while others are inspired by maps, graphs, and assorted artists. The formal and emotional versatilities that distinguish Hayes's award-winning poetry are unified by existential focus. Simultaneously complex and transparent, urgent and composed, How to Be Drawn is a mesmerizing achievement. Item number: 31735067570659
Lighthead by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3558.A8378 L54 2010
Publication Date: 2010
Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry. In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched. Item number: 31735072387198
Wind in a Box by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3558.A8378 W56 2006
Publication Date: 2006
The third collection of poetry from the author. Wind in a Box, Hayes's resonant collection, continues his interest in how traditions (of poetry and culture alike) can be simultaneously upended and embraced. The struggle for freedom (the wind) within containment (the box) is the unifying motif as Hayes explores how identity is shaped by race, heritage, and spirituality. This book displays not only what the Los Angeles Times calls the range of a "bold virtuoso," but also the imaginative fervor of a poet in love with poetry. Item number: 31735072309259
Hip Logic by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3558 .A8378 H57 2002
Publication Date: 2002
This second collection is full of poetic tributes to the likes of Paul Robeson, Big Bird, Balthus, and Mr. T, as well as poems based on the anagram principle of words within a word. Throughout, Hayes's verse dances in a kind of homemade music box, with notes that range from tender to erudite, associative to narrative, humorous to political. Hip Logic does much to capture the nuances of contemporary male African American identity and confirms Hayes's reputation as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry. Item number: 31735065133831
Muscular Music by Terrance Hayes
Call Number: PS3558.A8378 M87 2006
Publication Date: original 1999; reprint 2006
Originally published by Tia Chucha Press in 1999, Muscular Music, the debut collection of Terrance Hayes, won a Whiting Writers award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and received favorable reviews in the Washington Post Book World, Black Issues Book Review, The Poetry Book Club Review, and in several literary journals. Hayes' second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series Open Competition Winner, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His third book, Wind in a Box, was published by Penguin in 2006. Item number: 31735072309283