Award-winning poets John Keene and Marissa Davis will visit Bloomington-Normal for the annual SRPR Lucia Getsi Poetry Reading on Wednesday, April 10. The poetry reading is at 7 p.m. at the Normal Theater in Uptown Normal. A book signing will follow the reading. Keene received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry for Punks: New and Selected Poems, and he has also been recognized with a “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Marissa Davis is the winner of the 2023 SRPR Editors’ Prize for her poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish.
At 3 p.m. on April 10 in the Beckman Auditorium in the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University, Keene will be in conversation with IWU Professor Joanne Diaz. Both events are free and open to the public.
Local bookseller Bobzbay Books will have limited copies of John Keene’s Punks: New and Selected Poems available for purchase at the event. Secure a copy by preordering with pickup at the reading on 4/10.
ABOUT THE POETS
JOHN KEENE is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems, which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, a 2022 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and was longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize; and Counternarratives, which received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.
Awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in October 2018, Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions, 1995); the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), a collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received the inaugural 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses (in the United Kingdom) as well as a 2016 American Book Award, a 2016 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize in Fiction; and Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the 2022 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award. Keene’s other published work includes GRIND (ITI Press, 2016), an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner; and the poetry chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016).
He has published his fiction, poetry, essays, and translations in a wide array of journals, and his honors include a 2003 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a 2005 Whiting Foundation Award in Fiction and Poetry, and a 2008 Fellowship for Distinguished First Poetry Collection from the inaugural Pan-African Literary Forum. Keene’s introduction to the first English translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel The Obscene Madame D appeared in 2012 (Nightboat Books/A Bolha Editora), and his translation from the Portuguese of Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books/A Bolha Editora) was published in 2014. His essay “Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness” was featured on the Poetry Foundation’s website in 2016, and his essay “Translating Brazil’s Marquise de Sade,” on Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, appeared in Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World Literature, edited by Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho, and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.
A longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston, and a Graduate Fellow of Cave Canem, Keene has taught at Brown University; Northwestern University, where he served as director of the undergraduate creative writing program and acting co-director of the M.A./M.F.A. in creative writing program; and other institutions. He served on the inaugural juries for the Cave Canem Second Book Prize and the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, both published by Northwestern University Press. He serves as a fiction and hybrid writing editor at the literary journal Obsidian, as an advisory editor for Transition, and as a contributing editor for the James Baldwin Review. He also is a member of the planning and organizational committee and the publication jury for the African Poetry Book Series, which includes the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and which is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska’s African Poetry Book Fund and Prairie Schooner.
MARISSA DAVIS is a writer, translator, editor, and educator from Paducah, Kentucky. Following years in Nashville, Tennessee, and Paris, France, she now resides in Brooklyn, New York. She received her M.F.A. in poetry from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow.
Davis is the author of My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020), which received Cave Canem’s 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, chosen by poet Danez Smith.
Her work can be found in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Rattle, West Branch, Mississippi Review, Muzzle Magazine, Frontier Poetry, and Best New Poets, among other journals. Her translations are published or forthcoming in Northwest Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, Rhino, American Chordata, and The Offing. Her writing has received the honors of: runner-up of Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest, winner of Mississippi Review’s poetry contest, an Indiana Review contest finalist, a Black Warrior Review contest finalist, a Tin House scholarship, and a Stegner Fellowship (though for personal reasons, she did not attend the program), among others. In 2021, she was selected to judge that year’s PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
Professionally, Davis is an editor, both freelance (of university applications and creative writing) and salaried (as an assistant at Penguin Random House).
ABOUT THE SRPR LUCIA GETSI READING SERIES
Established and endowed in 2013 by longtime SRPR Editor and Illinois State University Distinguished Professor Emerita Lucia Getsi, the SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading is one of the premier poetry events in Central Illinois. Past readers have included Jerome Rothenberg, Kristin Prevallet, Rachel Jamison Webster, Chloe Garcia Roberts, Ruben Quesada, Ann Hudson, Roger Reeves, Julie Marie Wade, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Ewa Chrusciel, Emma Bolden, Monica Hand, Jason Bredle, Jacob Saenz, Bill Stobb, Joshua Corey, and many others.
EVENT SPONSORS
The SRPR Lucia Getsi Poetry Reading is made possible by the Harold K. Sage Fund and the Illinois State University Foundation, Lucia Getsi, SRPR, the Publications Unit, the Department of English at Illinois State University, and the Department of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.
If you need an accommodation to fully participate in this program/event, please contact Steve Halle at (309) 438-7481 or publicationsunit@IllinoisState.edu. Please allow sufficient time to arrange the accommodation.
