Celebration of Douglas Kearney’s SHO

The Department of English and the English EDI Graduate Workshops present a celebration of Assistant Professor Kearney’s new poetry collection, Sho (Wave Books). “The book is raucous theater, a party whose rhythms contain a meditation on what it means to have a body in public space,” says NPR. Kearney will be in conversation with the poet and scholar Evie Shockley.

Free. Register for webinar: z.umn.edu/KearneyRSVP

Douglas Kearney is a faculty member of the Creative Writing Program and is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee and Cave Canem fellow. He’s published six books, most recently Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection. A librettist, Kearney has had four operas staged, most recently Sweet Land, which received rave reviews from The LA Times, The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The LA Weekly.

Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar. Her most recent poetry collections are the new black (Wesleyan, 2011) and semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017); both won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the LA Times Book Prize. Her poetry has appeared internationally in print and audio formats, in English and in translation. She has received the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Cave Canem. Shockley is Professor of English at Rutgers University.