Nicole Sealey
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. An excerpt from her forthcoming collection, The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry (2018 and 2021). She was the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:
Seeing is Believing: Drafting the Lasting Image
In The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux argue that images should “produce a bit of magic, a reality so real it is ‘like being alive twice.’” As we know, images are closely linked to memory. As poets, after mining our respective memories, how do we deepen a reader’s experience with the poem via the image? How does one draft a lasting image? This workshop seeks to focus the image at the poem’s center. This workshop will explore the image and its implications. To this end, participants will review poems with images that reverberate and re-imagine their own poems with images that idle.
SESSION TIME / LOCATION:
11:30 - 12:30 p.m. - Recital Hall (Bldg. 8 - 132)
EVENING READING & BOOK SIGNING:
7:00 - 8:00 p.m. - Evening reading in the DuBow Theatre
8:00 - 8:30 p.m. - Book signing immediately following reading
