"You Are Who I Am Talking To": Bagley Wright Lecture Series at the Poetry Center

Thursday, February 22, 2018 - 7:00pm

Terrance Hayes, Joshua Beckman, and Dorothea Lasky read from and talk about their lectures, introduced by Matthew Zapruder. 

Since 2013, the Bagley Wright Lecture Series has provided leading poets with the opportunity to explore in-depth their own thinking on the subject of poetry and poetics. For the first time, lecturers Dorothea Lasky, Joshua Beckman, Timothy Donnelly, Terrance Hayes, Rachel Zucker, Srikanth Reddy, and BWLS director Matthew Zapruder, will gather to read from their lectures, reflect on this unique process, and talk about what comes next. Visit poetry.arizona.edu/BWLS to learn more about daytime offerings, including panel presentations.

This program is offered at the UA Poetry Center in partnership with the Bagley Wright Lecture Series and the Amazon Literary Partnerships

Dorothea Lasky is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: ROME, Thunderbird, Black Life and AWE. Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6×6, among other places. She is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also has been educated at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and Washington University. 

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of nine books, including The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead (Penguin 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn (Penguin 2015), his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear, Copper Canyon 2014. Why Poetry, a book of prose, is forthcoming from Ecco/Harper Collins in 2017. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship in Marfa, TX. An Associate Professor and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books, and directs the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry. He lives in Oakland, CA.

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