Mary Oliver's poetry has been called "an excellent antidote for the excesses of civilization." Her many books-26 at present count-are beloved and essential to a wide spectrum of readers the world over. Oliver has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award for Poetry, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, the New England Booksellers Association Award for Literary Excellence, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, among many other honors. Praising her work as "fine and deep," Stanley Kunitz went on to say "it reads like a blessing. Her special gift is to connect us with our sources in the natural world, its beauties and terrors and mysteries and consolations." Oliver makes her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Presented in collaboration with the Sophia Smith Collection

As dedicated to the senses as they are to the mind, Susan Stewart’s fiercely ambitious poems never for a minute forget to make music. As Allen Grossman writes, Stewart “has built a poetic syntax capable of conveying an utterly singular account of consciousness.” In addition to five collections of poems, most recently Columbarium and Red Rover, she has published five books of criticism and one of translation. Recipient of many honors, Stewart is Professor of English at Princeton University and a former MacArthur Fellow.

Presented by the Department of English Language & Literature

Twin brothers from the Lents neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, Matthew & Michael Dickman have each recently published first books and have been profiled in Poets & Writers and The New Yorker. Both have received fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Centers, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem was chosen by Tony Hoagland to win the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Pop culture and sacred longing go hand in hand in poems that deal with skinheads, parties, campus vending machines, biker gangs, suicides, and girls with tattoos—the background is a downbeat America, but the style looks back to the singing free verse of Walt Whitman and Frank O’Hara.

Michael Dickman’s The End of the West breathes in the world—delight, cruelty, boredom, and grief—and breathes out a prayer that holds both grace and suffering. With what Franz Wright calls “the utmost gravity as well as a kind of cosmic wit,” the poems flit and play and question, depicting spiritual longing, drug abuse, gritty neighborhoods, and unfailingly complicated human relationships. Michael is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

In his powerhouse debut, The Maverick Room, Thomas Sayers Ellis works the page the way his musical subjects—crooners, masters of funk, DC based go-go bands—work a room: with rhythm, sass and self-deprecating wit. These gregarious, socially conscious, and eversurprising poems dissect, embrace and reject traditional tropes of African American literature, and then take a linguistic swerve toward Gertrude Stein. Ellis serves as contributing editor to Callaloo and Poets & Writers magazine, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA program at Lesley University.