Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

John Murillo & Nicole Sealey followed by a conversation with Nathan McClain.

From a sonnet cycle scrutinizing justice through the blur of a city aflame to an image of Medusa spreading tarot cards across her apartment floor, John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020) explores epiphany and grief in the African American experience. Among his many honors, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and Murillo has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Murillo is also author of an earlier collection, Up Jump the Boogie (Four Way Books, 2020; Cypher, 2010), and his work has been featured in American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, and Best American Poetry.

Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure (Knopf, 2023) is a book that pushes the boundaries of form to convey the complexities that emerge when confronting violence against Black bodies. She is the author of Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017) and the award-winning chapbook, The Animal After Whom Other Animals are Named (Northwestern University Press, 2016). Sealey is the recipient of the 2021 Granum Foundation Prize, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. Sealey served as the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019. She teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

Co-sponsored by The Lecture Committee, Africana Studies, American Studies, the Archives Concentration, the Department of English Language and Literature, the Office for Equity and Inclusion, and the Study of Women and Gender.