Poetry
February 4, 2027
Tiered Tuition
Reserve My Spot
About the Offering
February 4th at 6pm to 7:30pm (Eastern)
Join us for a dynamic panel featuring Kevin Prufer, Martha Collins, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Naomi Shihab Nye, and David Baker as they each champion the work of an unjustly overlooked American poet. Panelists will introduce these writers, share their poems, and reflect on what makes the work urgent, distinctive, and worth returning to now.
Rather than arguing for a revised canon, these panelists are grounded in the pleasures of discovery and advocacy: what happens when one poet brings another’s work back into the room. Their conversation will also touch on the accidents of reputation—how strong work falls out of view, and how it might find new readers.
A digital chapbook of selected poems by the featured writers will be shared with attendees, so the audience can read along during the event and continue exploring the work afterward.
Materials Needed
No specific materials needed for this offering.
About the Instructor/Moderator
Wesleyan University Press introduces Other Legacies: Great Unsung American Poets, which brings together thirty-five extraordinary but under-recognized poets whose work has shaped and enriched the literary landscape of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These are writers whose contributions were overlooked because of race, gender, sexuality, disability, region, language, resistance to prevailing literary norms, or plain bad luck.
Here are author bios for the series director as well as several series contributors:
Kevin’s Prufer’s newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024
Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024). Others of his books have been listed as
among the year’s best by The New York Times, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly and his poetry collection How He Loved Them (Four Way Books) was long-listed for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award. He is the 2026 Poet Laureate of Texas and directs The Unsung Masters Series. His next books are Good People: Poems (Copper Canyon, 2027) and the novel Summer of Shooting Stars (Slant Books, 2028).
Martha Collins’ eleventh book of poetry, Casualty Reports, was published in the Pitt Poetry Series in October 2022. Her tenth book, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous poetry books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017). Her fifth co-translated volume, Dreaming the Mountain: Poems by Tue Sy, with Nyugen Ba Chung, was published by Milkweed in spring 2023. Collins has also co-edited other anthologies, including two volumes in the Unsung Masters Series, on Wendy Battin (2020) and Catherine Breese Davis (2015), and a volume of essays on the poet Jane Cooper (Michigan, 2019, with Celia Bland.
Rigoberto Gonzalez is the author of To the Boy Who Was Night: Poems Selected and New (2023), The Book of Ruin (2019), Unpeopled Eden (2013), winner of a Lambda Literary Award, and Black Blossoms (2011), all published by Four Way Books. His other poetry collections include Other Fugitives and Other Strangers (Tupelo Press, 2006) and So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks (University of Illinois Press, 1999), a National Poetry Series selection. González’s awards include Lannan, Guggenheim, NEA, NYFA, and USA Rolán fellowships, a PEN/ Voelcker Award, a Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and lifetime achievement awards from the Publishing Triangle and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than 30 volumes. Her books of poetry
for adults and children include 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (a finalist for the National Book Award), A Maze Me: Poems for Girls, Red Suitcase, Words Under the Words, Fuel, Transfer, You & Yours (a best-selling poetry book of 2006), Mint Snowball, Voices in the Air, Come with Me, Honeybee (awarded the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category), The Tiny Journalist (Best Poetry Book from both the Texas Institute of Letters and the Writers League of Texas), Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (one of the Washington Post's best children’s books of 2020), Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems, and Grace Notes.
David Baker is the author many books of poetry, including Transit (2026), Whale Fall (2022), and
Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019); his Never-Ending Birds was awarded the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is coeditor of Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (2025). Baker’s work appears in APR, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and is included in the landmark anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Baker served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. He is Emeritus Professor at Denison University and divides his time between Granville, Ohio, and Hudson, New York.
