On January 21, 2020, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poet Terrance Hayes.

Terrance Hayes is the author of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Penguin, 2018), a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018); How to Be Drawn (2015); Lighthead (2010), which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. An artist-in-residence at New York University, Hayes currently resides in New York City.

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

On December 5, 2019, the Lannan Center presented a special event featuring author Juan Gabriel Vásquez. This event was introduced by Aminatta Forna and moderated by Marie Arana.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is the author of numerous novels, including The Shape of the Ruins (2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 International Man Booker Prize; Reputations (2013), a New York Times Best Book of the Year; and The Sound of Things Falling (2011), a National Bestseller and winner of the 2014 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Vásquez’s novels have been published in twenty-five languages worldwide. After sixteen years in France, Belgium, and Spain, he now lives in Bogotá.

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

On September 24, 2019, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poets Ilya Kaminsky and John James. Introduced by Aminatta Forna.

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo, 2004). He has also co-edited and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). His awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, Lannan Foundation’s Fellowship and the NEA Fellowship. Currently, he holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Institute of Technology and lives in Atlanta.

John James is the author of The Milk Hours, selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and published in 2019 by Milkweed Editions. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Best American Poetry 2017, and elsewhere, and his work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley.

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

On April 23, 2019, the Lannan Center presented a reading and talk featuring poet Nikky Finney. Introduced by Aminatta Forna.

Nikky Finney is the author of the poetry collections Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books, 2011), winner of the 2011 National Book Award; The World Is Round (InnerLight Publishing, 2003); Rice (Sister Vision, 1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (W. Morrow, 1985). She has been a faculty member at Cave Canem, a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, and professor for twenty-three years at the University of Kentucky.

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