Terrance Hayes, an award-winning poet and 2014 MacArthur Fellow, will read from his work at 7:30 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 10, in Hall Campus Center’s Memorial Ballroom. The event is part of the University of Lynchburg’s Thornton Reading series.
The public is invited, admission is free, and a book signing will follow the reading. While on campus, Hayes also will meet with creative writing students.
Hayes is an English professor at New York University and the author of six books of poetry. His most recent, “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry.
Hayes also is the author of “To Float in the Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight.” The short story collection won the 2019 Etheridge Knight Criticism Collection award from The Poetry Foundation.
Additional awards and honors include, among others, two Pushcart Prizes, eight “Best American Poetry” selections, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, The American Poetry Review, and other magazines and literary journals.
“Hayes is a justly acclaimed poet,” Dr. Laura Long, an English professor at Lynchburg, said. “Anyone who reads his work is likely to be persuaded of the power of poetry. He revels in the playfulness and elegance of poetry and is a dazzling writer. He encompasses an enormous range of emotions and thoughts, and both personal and political perspectives of the Black experience in America.”
Each semester, the Thornton Endowment brings established writers to the University of Lynchburg. These novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists, essayists, and other writers do a public reading or lecture, and oftentimes meet with students for classes or workshops.
For more information about the Thornton Readings, contact Jer Bryant ’03 MA, ’10 MFA, Richard H. Thornton Chair and assistant professor of English, at bryant.j@lynchburg.edu or 434.544.8588.
