Faculty Presentation: Eileen Myles, Megan Foster and Major Jackson
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
5-7 PM
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
Join us for an reading and artist talk with poets Eileen Myles and Major Jackson, and artist Megan Foster.
To join us virtually, visit our YouTube Channel and look for the “Upcoming live streams” section. The majority of our public events are available via YouTube live stream with the presenters’ permission.
About Our Speakers
Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Their newest books are Pathetic Literature and a “Working Life”, poems. Myles’s fiction includes Chelsea Girls (1994) which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for You (2000), Inferno (a poet’s novel) (2010) and Afterglow (2017). Writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009). They live in New York and in Marfa, TX.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023). His forthcoming cookbook, A Bowl of Goodness: Nourishing Poems with a Side of Soup, will be published in October 2026. His honors include fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. He is the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize in American Poetry from Yale Library. Jackson has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and World Literature Today. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 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.
Megan Foster earned her BFA from RISD and MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been shown at venues including Black and White Gallery, Mixed Greens, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Inside-Out Art Museum (Beijing), and the San Jose Museum of Art.
Foster’s prints and installations elevate everyday moments into open-ended narratives that examine the expectations of contemporary life and shifting connections to nature and technology. Drawing from imagery in art, architecture, and science, she repositions the ordinary as a site of reflection and spectacle.
She is an associate professor and department head of Printmaking at RISD, past master printer at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, and co-founder of Moonlight Editions.
