Dear Yusef: a Celebration of Yusef Komunyakaa
Hosted by John Murillo and Nicole Sealey
Thursday, March 20, 2025
6 PM ET
A Virtual Event
We are excited to invite you to a remarkable event hosted by the 24PearlStreet Online Writing Program in honor of the upcoming release of Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa (Wesleyan University Press, November 2024). This collection, edited by renowned poets John Murillo and Nicole Sealey, pays tribute to the influential work of Yusef Komunyakaa.
Featured Readers:
– Major Jackson
– Jennifer Jean
– John Murillo
– Nicole Sealey
Don’t miss this opportunity to celebrate poetry and prose with us! Join our esteemed readers for an evening of insightful reflections and powerful readings.
Virtual Admission Tickets are complimentary and accessible to everyone. To order the book with your ticket, select the Virtual Admission Ticket (with book) option, and we will send you a copy.
About Our Readers
Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently The Absurd Man (2020), and a collection of essays, A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson. He is the guest editor of Best American Poetry 2019. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares and Poetry London. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. She’s co-written and co-translated the forthcoming collaborative and bilingual collection Where do you live? أين تعيشين؟ (Arrowsmith Press, 2025) with Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmed. As well, she’s edited the forthcoming anthology Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press, 2026). She’s received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Academy of American Poets, the Mass Cultural Council, DISQUIET, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. Jennifer is an organizer for the artist collective Her Story Is, a faculty member at Solstice MFA, and the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program.
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His translation of Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2025. He is a professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and about Mr. Komunyakaa. Her recent honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.
The Fine Arts Work Center is committed to making its events and services inclusive and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations to fully participate, please contact our Accessibility Coordinator, Susan Blood, at 508-487-9960, extension 106.
Both the Stanley Kunitz Common Room and the Hudson D. Walker Gallery meet ADA accessibility standards. If you need help accessing these spaces, please call us at 508-487-9960 ext. 101 before your visit.
This program is supported in part by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, Mass Cultural Council, Mass Development, and Provincetown Tourism Fund, and Provincetown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
