Discussion | Black Odysseys: Artists in Conversation

A panel discussion with the following:

Elizabeth Alexander's poetry includes The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005), Miss Crandalls School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (2008), co-authored with Marilyn Nelson, and Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 (2010). Alexander received a Fletcher Fellowship for work that contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. She is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and Chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale.

Marilyn Nelson's latest collection of poems is Faster Than Light (2012), winner of the 2013 Milton Kessler Poetry Award. Her book The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997) won the 1998 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. Her numerous young adult books include Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), which received the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and other honors. In January 2013, she was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.
,br> Rowan Ricardo Philips poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among other publications. He is author of the forthcoming Heaven, and of The Ground (2012), which won numerous awards and honors. Phillips also wrote a study of poetry, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010); translated Salvador Esprius Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth from the Catalan; and contributed to Artforum Magazine. Phillips teaches creative writing at Princeton University and is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Poetry Center at Stony Brook University.

The panel discussion will be followed by a question and answer session with the audience.