Lannan Center Podcast

On March 21, 2024, renowned authors Reginald Dwayne Betts (Felon: Poems) and Zeke Caligiuri (This is Where I Am) offered their thoughts on the intersection of literature and the prison system as they discussed the impact of incarceration in shaping their writing lives, creative processes and narratives. This event was cosponsored by the Prisons and Justice Initiative. 

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, he is the Executive Director of Freedom Reads, a not-for-profit organization that is radically transforming the access to literature in prisons through the installation of Freedom Libraries in prisons across this country. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show. 

Zeke Caligiuri is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am (University of Minnesota Press), finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. He is the co-founder of the Stillwater Writer’s Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country. Caligiuri is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center. He is an editor and contributor to the anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023).

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 20, 2024, bestselling author and deaf rights’ activist Sara Nović talked about her writing life and novelTrue Biz, with the Washington Post‘s Amanda Morris. This event was coponsored by the Disability Cultural Center and ASL interpreted. 

Sara Nović is the author of the New York Times bestseller True Biz. Her other books are Girl at War, which won the American Library Association’s Alex Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and America is Immigrants. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied fiction and literary translation, and is an instructor of Deaf studies and creative writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her family.

Amanda Morris is a disability reporter for The Washington Post who has trailblazed on this beat. Before joining The Post in 2022, she was the inaugural disability reporting fellow for the New York Times and previously covered science, politics and national news for outlets like the Arizona Republic, the Associated Press, and NPR. She uses her experiences as a hard of hearing woman with two deaf parents to inform her coverage.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On March 19, 2024 , acclaimed author Viet Thanh Nguyen discussed his memoir, A Man of Two Faces, and reflected on the TV adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer. With former Newshour host Razia Iqbal.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer (Corsair, 2016) is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (coming to HBO as a TV series directed by Park Chan-wook). His other books include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award), and The Committed. Nguyen is a University Professor, the Aerol Arnold Chair of English, and a Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 27, 2024, the Lannan Center presented a reading featuring Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov and Slovene poet Aleš Šteger.

Nikola Madzirov is the author of Remnants of Another Age and Relocated Stone, which received the Hubert Burda European Poetry Award and the prestigious Miladinov Brothers Award. He was awarded the Studentski Zbor Award for Locked in the City and the Aco Karamanov prize for Somewhere Nowhere. Born into a family of Balkan Wars refugee in 1973 in Strumica, Macedonia, Madzirov has gone on to participate in many international literary festivals and events in the US, Latin America, and Europe, and he has received several international awards and fellowships.

Aleš Šteger, born 1973 in Ptuj, lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, novels, and essays as well as several books for young adults. He also works as an editor, translator and initiator of artistic and cultural events. Six of his books have been published in English: The Book of Things (BOA Editions, US, 2010), which won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award and the 2011 Best Literary Translation into English Award from AATSEEL; the collection of lyric essays, Berlin (Counterpath, US, 2015); the book of prose poems, Essential Baggage (Equipage, 2016); the novel Absolution (Istros Books, 2017); Above the Sky Beneath the Earth (White Pine Press, US, 2019); and The Book of Bodies (White Pine Press, US, 2022). His retrospective, Burning Tongues: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe Books in the UK in 2022.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, February 6, 2024, the Lannan Center presented a reading by poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Saddiq Dzukogi, Henneh Kyereh Kwaku, and Tolu Oloruntoba.

Victoria Adukwei Bulley is a poet, writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection Quiet was published by Faber in 2022 and was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023 in the Poetry category. Quiet was also shortlisted for the T.S. Elliot Prize and the Pollard Poetry Prize.

Saddiq Dzukogi is a Nigerian poet and Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), winner of the 2021 Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2022 Julie Suk Award.

Henneh Kyereh Kwaku is a poet of Bono heritage and the author of Revolution of the Scavengers (African Poetry Book Fund / Akashic Books, 2020). A 2022 resident at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora, and a recipient of the 2020 Samira Bawumia Literature Prize, he is originally from Gonasua in the Jaman South Municipality (Bono Region) of Ghana.

Tolu Oloruntoba is the author of Each One a Furnace (Penguin Randomhouse, 2022) and The Junta of Happenstance (Anstruther, 2021), winner of the 20222 Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Oloruntoba spent his early career as a primary care physician and currently manages virtual health projects.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, November 7, 2023, the Lannan Center presented a special reading featuring poets Carolyn Forché, Ilya Kaminsky, Lyudmyla Khersonska, and Boris Kershonsky. Moderated by Askold Melnyczuk.

Renowned as a “poet of witness,” Carolyn Forché is University Professor at Georgetown and the author of five books of poetry, including In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin, 2020).

Born in Odesa, Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), a New York Times’ Notable Book and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo, 2004).

Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian, including Today is A Different War (Arrowsmith Press).

Widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets, Boris Khersonsky is author of seventeen collections of poetry and essays in Russian, and most recently, in Ukrainian.

Founding editor of Arrowsmith Press, Askold Melnyczuk, is an award-winning translator and author, most recently of the book of stories, The Man Who Would Not Bow (2021).

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 17, 2023, the Lannan Center presented a reading by writer and Lannan Visiting Chair, Rabih Alameddine. Introduction by Deborah Tannen, Distinguished University Professor.

Rabih Alameddine is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, most recently The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press, 2021), winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize in 2022. He is also the author of The Angel of History (Grove Press, 2016), winner of the Lambda Literary Award 2017; An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); Koolaids (Picador, 1999); and a collection of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Harold Washington Literary Award in 2018, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2019, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and recently, a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University and the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. Alameddine is currently the Lannan Foundation Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, October 3, 2023 the Lannan Center presented a reading and conversation featuring writer Leila Aboulela and moderated by Tope Folarin, Lannan Creative Writing Visiting Lecturer. Introduction by Rabih Alameddine, Lannan Visiting Chair.

Leila Aboulela is a Sudanese writer whose work has received critical recognition and a high profile for its depiction of the interior lives of Muslim women and its distinctive exploration of identity, migration and Islamic spirituality. She is the author of six novels: River Spirit, Bird Summons, Minaret, The Translator, a New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year, The Kindness of Enemies and Lyrics Alley, Fiction Winner of the Scottish Book Awards. Leila was the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing and her latest story collection, Elsewhere, Home won the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year Award. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages and she was long-listed three times for the Orange Prize, (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Leila grew up in Khartoum and moved in her mid-twenties to Aberdeen.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On Tuesday, September 19, 2023, the Lannan Center presented a reading by poet Arthur Sze. Introduction by Duncan Wu, Raymond Wagner Professor in Literary Studies.

Arthur Sze has published eleven books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award, and The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021). His other books include Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. A Chancellor Emeritus at the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.

On April 11, 2023, The Lannan Center hosted a reading and talk featuring poets Camille T. Dungy and Major Jackson.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Major Jackson is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems; The Absurd Man; Roll Deep; Holding Company; Hoops; and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and in Best American Poetry. He served as guest editor of Best American Poetry in 2019. Jackson is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at the University of Vermont.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.