Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

Ari Banias’s work takes place in the rich, artful between-space. In the first poem of his newest book, A Symmetry (W.W. Norton, 2021) he writes: “Some men are women too/the way a mountain is land and a harbor is land and a parking lot/Refuse the difference between sameness and difference.” A fresh injection of mutability in a rigid world, his poems capture stills from the unending motion of meaning-making. As writer Gregg Bordowitz says, “Ari Banias attunes to unacquainted frequencies with great precision…alternating between brutal excesses and incalculable joys. Every line holds. Reading this book is like feeling gravity.”

In addition to A Symmetry, which won the 2022 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender Variant Literature, Ari is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2018). His work has been featured in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, American Poetry Review, and Triple Canopy, among others.

Banias’s reading will be followed by a conversation with Art Middleton. Books will be sold by Broadside Books before the event and a signing will follow the reading.

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.