Jan
5
1:00am
Rumpus Poetry Book Club presents Quan Barry, author of Auction X Nancy Krygowski of Pitt Poetry Series and special guest, Terrance Hayes
By The Rumpus
Join us for an exclusive Rumpus Poetry Book Club conversation with author Quan Barry, Pitt Poetry Series's Nancy Krygowski, and Rumpus Poetry Editor, Brian Spears. They'll discuss Quan Barry's AUCTION and how it fits into The University of Pittsburgh's editorial vision.
About the December Poetry Book Club selection:
In AUCTION, her first poetry collection in eight years, the poet, novelist, and playwright Quan Barry travels the globe in her signature quest into the existential nature of experience. These poems explore the inner landscapes of both the human and animal realms, revealing them to be points along the same spectrum. At the heart of the book lies an extended study of toxic storytelling as an element of warcraft, but Barry also contemplates the death of a Buddhist master, the plight of migrants both at home and abroad, the ethics of travel and consumption, and the larger question of how and why we construct a self in order to navigate the world.
ABOUT QUAN BARRY: Born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s northshore, Quan Barry is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barry is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry, including the novel, When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East, which the NY Times described as, “Mesmerizing and delicate . . . a dazzling achievement…The unlikeliness of the novel is exactly its magic.” Barry is one of a select group of writers to receive NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction. In 2021, her novel, We Ride Upon Sticks, was awarded the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Barry is a member of the Dramatist Guild. Her first play production, The Mytilenean Debate, premiered in spring 2022. She is currently Forward Theater’s first ever Writer-in-Residence.
Brian Spears is Senior Poetry Editor at The Rumpus and author of A Witness in Exile (Louisiana Literature Press 2011). He lives in Des Moines.
Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A collection of poems, So To Speak, and collection of essays, Watch Your Language, are forthcoming on Penguin in 2023. Hayes is a Silver Professor of English at New York University.
Nancy Krygowski is the author of The Woman in the Corner, named one of 2020’s top 100 poetry books by Library Journal, and Velocity, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She teaches in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and is a member of the Pitt Poetry Series interim editorial committee.
The University of Pittsburgh Press is a publisher with distinguished lists in a wide range of scholarly and cultural fields. We publish books for general readers, scholars, and students.
In our efforts to acquire the best available scholarship, the Press has focused on selected academic areas: Latin American studies, Russian and East European studies, Central Asian studies, composition and literacy studies, environmental studies, urban studies, the history of architecture and the built environment, and the history and philosophy of science, technology, and medicine. Our books about Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania include history, art, architecture, photography, biography, fiction, and guidebooks.
Our renowned Pitt Poetry Series represents many of the finest poets active today, as reflected in the many prestigious awards their work has garnered over the past four decades. In addition, the Press is home to the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and, in rotation with other university presses, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. We also sponsor the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which recognizes the finest collective works of short fiction available in an international competition.
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