Faculty Presentation: Nicole Sealey and Deborah Jackson Taffa
Monday, August 3, 2026
5-7 PM
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
Join us for a summer faculty reading with writers Nicole Sealey and Deborah Jackson Taffa .
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
Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, for and about One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Deborah Jackson Taffa’s Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award finalist, a 2025 Carnegie Medal longlisted title, and a top book of the year at The Atlantic, Time, Esquire, NPR and other outlets. A 2024 NEA Fellow, and a 2022 winner of the PEN/Jean Stein grant, she has received fellowships from the University of Iowa and other places. She is the director of the MFACW program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.