Poets at the Heyman Center

Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, chosen by Carl Phillips, who writes the book “offers us the poem as prose story, as an exchange of text messages with the dead, as collapsed opera, as Tweet, even as a possible mash-up of rap, litany, and Stein’s prosody,” which are all ways to enact “the ceaseless hunger that is the book’s thematic core.” She is a recipient of a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. D. A. Powell is the author of five collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible” (Stephen Burt). He is a Professor at University of San Francisco. Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, most recently MOTHERs, a memoir, and The Pedestrians, a double collection of poetry and prose. “Her poems read like skin-of-your-teeth escapes from impending disaster”; and as mediations on time, they focus “on one of its most heartbreaking dilemmas: how to be in the moment when all you can think about is the nostalgia you’ll feel for it once it’s over. Poetry as a temporal acrobatics, outwitting distraction” (Dan Chiasson). She teaches poetry at NYU and is the host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People).