Summer Salons
22nd U.S. Poet Laureate
Tracy K. Smith
with Award-winning Poet
Roger Reeves
Friday, May 31, 2024
Saturday, June 1, 2024
Friday, May 31, 2024
6:00 – 7:30 PM ET
On Liberation and the Imagination:
A Conversation with Roger Reeves and Tracy K. Smith
5:00 PM Reception
Daniel A. Mullin Courtyard
6:00 – 7:30 PM Salon Conversation
Stanley Kunitz Common Room
Join us on Friday evening for an engaging conversation between two remarkable guests. Past U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and award-winning poet and essayist Roger Reeves will discuss their latest books, Dark Days: Fugitive Essays by Reeves and To Free the Captives by Smith. Their conversation will delve into the unexpected ways in which their works intersect around issues of liberation and imagination. Don’t miss this opportunity to be inspired by these two visionary writers.
Saturday, June 1, 2024
2:00 – 4:00 PM ET
In-person Workshop with Tracy K. Smith
Conscience & Consciousness
By what means do poems cause us to travel in toward the source of our own convictions, and out toward the far-reaches of empathy, imagination and consciousness? In this generative poetry workshop, we will read and discuss poems by Roger Reeves, Marie Howe and Victoria Adukwei Bulley, paying close attention to the craft-based choices that facilitate the effects of feeling, transformation and revelation in the reader. In-class writing prompts will allow participants to experiment with implementing similar strategies in their own material.
Having served as US Poet Laureate from 2017-2019, Tracy K. Smith is the author of five books of poetry: Such Color: New and Selected Poems; Wade in the Water, winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry; Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award, and The Body’s Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Saturday, June 1, 2024
2:00 – 4:00 PM ET
Virtual Zoom Workshop with Roger Reeves
The Summer Notebook
In this workshop, we will look at Robert Haas’ ‘notebook’ poems and think about the form of the notebook. How might the notebook provide both a flexible and sturdy form for lyric meditation? What does a notebook form offer us as poets when we see our meditations as interconnected but not necessarily next to each other or the proximity between the meditations is looser? In this workshop we will close-read and begin writing our own Notebook poems thinking about what meditational material might want to reside in community / next to each other.
Roger Reeves is the author of Best Barbarian (W.W. Norton & Co., 2022), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Tracy K. Smith called it “a revelation and a form of reparation.” His debut collection is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His newest book is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays (Graywolf, 2023.) His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, two Cave Canem Fellowships and a Whiting Award. He earned a B.A. in English from Morehouse College, an M.A. in English from Texas A&M University, an MFA from the James A. Michener Center for Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.
Proceeds from these paid events ensure that the Fine Arts Work Center is able to provide free arts and culture events for the Outer Cape Cod community year round.
