Make Something: Poet Terrance Hayes Practices Creativity
Association of Writers and Writing Programs - Hynes Convention Center
(Kwame Dawes (moderator), Jorie Graham, Terrance Hayes) Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham and National Book Award-winner Terrance Hayes stretch language past the barriers of mind and limitations of personal experience to reinstate a kind of dignity to the world. Their creative tensions puncture the commonplace allowing the familiar to dislocate, laying bare our tenuous connection to life. Yet grace and a vivid, wakeful presence abide. Their poems demonstrate how the excavation of language itself can shape new possibilities for imagination to evolve.
Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including PLACE; Sea Change; Overlord; The Errancy; The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and The End of Beauty. Her many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award. She has taught at the University of Iowa and is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. She served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1997 to 2003. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut.
Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series; and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including two Pushcart selections, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, he lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.
