The Harvard Department of English presents the Morris Gray Poetry Reading featuring January Gill O’Neil and Juliana Spahr. Join us at 6pm in the Thompson Room at 12 Quincy St. on Tuesday April 28th for a poetry reading and Q and A from the poets with an introduction by Professor Tracy K. Smith. This event will also be livestreamed below.
January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, and American Poetry Review. A Cave Canem fellow, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member, and she teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.
Juliana Spahr is a poet and scholar. Her scholarly work focuses on twentieth century and contemporary American literature and its relation to the state and also to social movements. She uses a range of approaches, including data collection, computational and network analysis, archival research, and close reading. Her most recent scholarly book, Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment (Harvard U P, 2019), studies a wide range of institutional forces—such the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, and private philanthropy—that shape U.S. literary production. She has received fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has been rewarded the O. B. Hardison Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her most recent book of poems is Ars Poeticas from Wesleyan U P. Crowd Control: The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward, cowritten with Claire Grossman and Stephanie Young, is forthcoming from Columbia U.P