Poetry Day: Carolyn Forché & Jamaal May

Join poets from two generations for the 60th annual Poetry Day. Carolyn Forché’s first volume, Gathering the Tribes, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was praised by Nelson Mandela as “itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice.” It was followed by the 2014 anthology Poetry of Witness.

Jamaal May’s first book, Hum (2013), won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. He is founding editor of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series. A 2014 Cave Canem resident, May was recently awarded Poetry magazine’s $5000 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize for his poems “Per Fumum” and “There Are Birds Here,” published in Poetry’s February 2014 issue.  

Inaugurated by Robert Frost in 1955, Poetry Day is one of the oldest and most distinguished poetry reading series in the country, having featured such poets of note as T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Carl Sandburg, W.H. Auden, Anne Sexton, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and Robert Hass.

Co-sponsored with the Chicago Public Library