Thursday, September 4, 7:00PM 
jennifer Chang

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, Some Say the Lark, and An Authentic Life, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other honors include the William Carlos Williams Award, the Levinson Prize from Poetry, and fellowships to the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She teaches at the University of Texas in Austin and is the poetry editor of New England Review. 

Thursday, September 25, 7:00 PM 
Distinguished Visitors in Creative Writing Reading: Josh Riedel and Thomas Dai

Josh Riedel is the author of the novel Please Report Your Bug Here, called a “sharp literary thriller” by The New York Times and selected as an Amazon Editors’ Pick in “Best Science Fiction & Fantasy.” The recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, his short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Electric Literature, Slate, Joyland, and One Story, among others. He lives in Portland, Oregon. 

Thomas Dai is the author of the essay collection Take My Name but Say It Slow (W. W. Norton, 2025). He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary, PLAYA, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, Longreads, and many other publications. Born and raised in East Tennessee, Thomas now lives in the Inland Pacific Northwest, where he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Idaho. 

Thursday, October 9, 7:00 PM 
Tom Sanders Memorial Reading: Richard Siken and Mathias Svalina  

Richard Siken is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize (selected by Louise Glück), a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). Siken is a recipient of two Lannan Fellowships and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona. 

Mathias Svalina is the author of eight books, most recently Thank You Terror, published by Big Lucks Books. His first short story collection, Comedy, is forthcoming from Trident Books. Svalina was a founding editor of the small press Octopus Books. Since 2014 he has run a dream delivery service, traveling around the country to write & deliver dreams to subscribers. 

Thursday, October 23, 7:00PM 
Tucson Humanities Festival Reading: Tracy K. Smith 

Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She is the author of eight books, including the poetry collection Such Color: New and Selected Poems and a new work of nonfiction titled Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times.  She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-19, during which time she spearheaded American Conversations: Celebrating Poetry in Rural Communities with the Library of Congress and created the American Public Media podcast The Slowdown. 

This reading is presented with support from the College of Humanities. 

Thursday, October 30, 7:00PM 
Susan Briante and Farid Matuk 

Susan Briante is the author most recently of Defacing the Monument, a series of essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. Briante is also the author of three books of poetry: Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and The Market Wonders. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. Her book 13 Questions for the Next Economy: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2025. 

Farid Matuk is the author of the poetry collections This Isa Nice Neighborhood, The Real Horse, and Moon Mirrored Indivisible. With visual artist Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez, Matuk created the book-arts project Redolent, recipient of the Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From Spanish, Matuk has translated Tilsa Otta’s selected poems, publishing these under the title The Hormone of Darkness (Graywolf Press, 2024).  Matuk’s work has been supported by residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, a visiting Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry at the University of California, Berkeley, and a 2024 USA Fellowship from United States Artists. 

Thursday, November 6, 7:00PM 
Hannelore Quander-Rattee Works-in-Translation Series: Karen Emmerich  

Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek literature and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She has translated over twenty books from Greek, and her translation awards include the National Translation Award for Ersi Sotiropoulos’s What’s Left of the Night, the Best Translated Book Award for Eleni Vakalo’s Beyond Lyricism, and the PEN Poetry in Translation Award for Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile (co-translated with Edmund Keeley). Emmerich is also the author of Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. She lives in Brooklyn.

This reading is presented in collaboration with the American Literary Translators Association and as part of the ALTA48 conference.  

Saturday, November 15, 1:00PM 
Silently Louder: New music by nonspeaking autistic poets and songwriters, performed by folksinger and poet Brian Laidlaw 

This event is presented in collaboration with Unrestricted Interest, an organization offering mentorship to neurodivergent writers. Following up on a memorable concert in 2023, Brian Laidlaw returns to the Poetry Center to perform a set of new songs composed by nonspeaking autistic lyricists and poets.

Thursday, November 20, 7:00PM 
Vievee Francis and Matthew Olzmann  

Vievee Francis is the author of four books of poetry: The Shared World; Forest Primeval, winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award; Horse in the Dark, winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly. Forthcoming are a memoir, Ugly, and her fifth volume of poetry, Cleaning the Houses of the Dead. She received a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. She has also been the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award and a Kresge Fellowship. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. 

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. His next book, An Oral History of the Flat Earth is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2027. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Dartmouth College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Wednesday, December 3, 7:00PM 
Bagley Wright Lecture Series: Anselm Berrigan   

This talk is one of several that the poet Anselm Berrigan is writing as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, a nonprofit that supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Anselm Berrigan is the author of many books of poetry including most recently, Don't Forget to Love Me (Wave Books, 2024). This lecture is presented in collaboration with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. 

Thursday, December 4, 7:00PM 
Anselm Berrigan  

Anselm Berrigan's latest book of poetry is Don't Forget to Love Me. Other books include Pregrets; Something for Everybody; Come In Alone Primitive State; Notes from Irrelevance; Free Cell; Some Notes on My Programming; Zero Star Hotel; and Integrity and Dramatic Life. He is also the editor of What is Poetry? (Just Kidding, I Know You Know): Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter (1983–2009) and co-author of two collaborative books: Loading, with visual artist Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and Skasers, with poet John Coletti (Flowers & Cream, 2012). He teaches writing classes at Pratt Institute and Brooklyn College, and was a longtime Co-Chair in Writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts interdisciplinary MFA program.