Award-Winning Readings: National Book Award nominees and winner in Poetry

Ariana Reines is author of Mercury (2011), The Cow (2006), and Coeur de Lion (2007). Her play Telephone was produced at the Cherry Lane Theater and won several Obie awards. Reines was 2009 Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California Berkeley; she has taught master classes at Pomona College, the University of California Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh. In poems tracking climate change, bystanderism, state murder, sexual trauma, shopping, ghosting, love, and the transcendent shock of prophecy, A Sand Book (Tin House Books), nominated for a National Book Award in Poetry, chronicles new dimensions of consciousness for our strange and desperate times. What does the destruction of our soil have to do with the weather in the human soul? From sand in the gizzards of birds to the iridescence on the surface of spilt oil, from sand storms on Mars to our internet-addicted present, from the desertifying mountains of Haiti to Sandy Hook to Hurricane Sandy to Sandra Bland, A Sand Book is both a travelogue and a book of mourning. The New York Times noted: “Her writing is queer and raunchy, raw and occult, seemingly never pulling away from her deepest vulnerabilities. Yet Reines simultaneously maintains a feeling of epic poetry, of ancient intention. She moves between worlds in search of the divine and the self.”

Brian Teare is the author of Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. He has also published eight chapbooks, including Paradise Was Typeset, SORE EROS, and Headlands Quadrats. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony. He is now an associate professor at University of Virginia, and makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books. Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books) nominated for a National Book Award in Poetry, is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. These site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass, wartime days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, and through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.

Dan Beachy-Quick  has written six books of poetry; six chapbooks, including Canto, and Mobius Crowns, written in collaboration with the poet Srikanth Reddy; a book of interlinked essays on Moby-Dick titled A Whaler’s Dictionary; as well as a collection of essays, fragments, and poems, Of Silence & Song; and a collection of essays, meditations and tales, Wonderful Investigations; a novel, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky, and A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work, a monograph about John Keats. His work has been a winner of the Colorado Book Award, and has been a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the PEN/USA Literary Award in Poetry, and included on the Best American Poetry anthology. The poems in Variations on Dawn and Dusk (Omnidawn Publishing), nominated for a National Book Award in Poetry,  act as records of light, following the sun as it warms, cools, colors, and shifts the space of Robert Irwin’s untitled (dawn to dusk) in the desert of Marfa, TX. Built on the footprint of the town’s old hospital, Irwin’s permanent installation is a remarkable structure with walls, windows, and screens that both capture and are taken over by the sun’s changing light. The poet’s observations lead us in cycles of meditation, moving with the light that slides through the surfaces of the installation. Building from Irwin’s use of rhythm and structure, the poems in this collection are constructed with an architectural framework.

Denise Duhamel's most recent book of poetry is Scald. Blowout was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, Mille et un Sentiments and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems. She has also published volumes of collaborative poetry with Maureen Seaton, Amy Lemmon, and Sandy McIntosh. The guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is co-author (with Julie Marie Wade) of The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press) a dual female reading experience that navigates the social clock, desire across the gendered spectrum, marriage, divorce, fertility/non-motherhood, violence, and body image with humor, poignancy, thoughtful reflection, and striking narrative scenes. Duhamel (b. 1961) and Wade (b. 1979) harmonize their unique voices that bracket "Generation X."

Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa, a poetry collection, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. He was a 2014 finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Ilya Kaminsky’s collection of poems Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear―they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them. The New York Times Book Review noted “These poems bestow the power of sacred drama on a secular martyrology. . . . By situating these poems in a country at war, Kaminsky forces the reader to consider both the ways in which we define our social belonging and the loyalties according to which we operate.”

Jericho Brown is the author of The New Testament (2014), which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please (2008), which received the 2009 American Book Award. His most recent book, The Tradition is a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. Brown worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998. The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown’s poetic concerns are both broad and intimate and at their very core a distillation of the human. With clarity and a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues, he makes poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma, questioning the terrors to which we’ve become accustomed, and celebrating how we survive. U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith noted that “These astounding poems by Jericho Brown don't merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters―loss, desire, rage, becoming―and stay there until something necessary begins to make sense.”

Toi Derricotte is an award-winning poet whose work tackles difficult and universal subject matter such as violence, racism, motherhood, and self-identity through an autobiographical lens. She is the author of The Undertaker’s Daughter and four previous poetry collections,  including Tender, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. Derricotte is a co-founder of Cave Canem, professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. “I”: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press), a finalist for a National Book Award in Poetry, shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet’s inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman’s response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five of Derricotte’s previously published books of poetry.