Events

When it was announced that Jewish-American poet Louise Gluck had been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature, Gluck became the first woman poet from the United States to win the prestigious honor. Using this “unprecedented” announcement as a launch point, this webinar features three women poets whose work, like Gluck’s own, has alternately been described as “confessional” and “personal.” The “confessional” school of poetry originated in the United States in the mid-twentieth-century, and important poets such as Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton have been associated with that school. Yet Gluck and her readers have argued that her lyrics are more than merely “confessional” in mode, though they are undeniably personal and autobiographical. Likewise, the three women poets serving on this webinar panel are renowned for their personal lyrics that are more than merely confessional. Each panelist will address the significance of Gluck’s being named the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and share their approaches to the “confessional,” “personal,” and/or autobiographical school of poetry.

Panelists include:

• Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem, was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020 and was named a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
• Diana Khoi Nguyen, a poet and multimedia artist, is the author of Ghost Of (Omnidawn 2018), and recipient of a 2021 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to winning the 92Y "Discovery" / Boston Review Poetry Contest, 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Colorado Book Award, she was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize. A Kundiman fellow, she is core faculty in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA and an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
• Shara McCallum is the author of six books of poetry, published in the US and UK, including No Ruined Stone (forthcoming in 2021) and Madwoman (winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry). McCallum’s work has appeared widely in the US, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe, and has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. McCallum is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. From Jamaica, McCallum is Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State.

Moderator:

• Tyler Mills, a poet and essayist, is the author of The City Scattered (winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award, Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, University of Akron Press 2019) and Tongue Lyre (winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013). With Kendra DeColo, Mills is co-author of Low Budget Movie (winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize and forthcoming in 2021) and she is finishing a nonfiction memoir-in-essays manuscript titled The Bomb Cloud.