AWP 2019: Poets Claim American History with Martha Collins

In recent years, many poets have turned to history as the inspiration for book-length projects. How does the poet’s craft encompass the historian’s? Panelists will explore strategies for choosing a resonant subject and interpreting another era using documents, maps, landscapes, and photographs. Do historical characters and events broaden the audience for poetry? Are there different readers for poetry, historical fiction, documentary films, and narrative history or do they overlap?

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Dolores Hayden, poet and historian, professor emerita, Yale University, is the author of American Yard, Exuberance, and The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. A poetry resident at Djerassi and VCCA and an NEA and Guggenheim fellow, she has won a PSA award and an ALA Notable Book Award.

Marilyn Nelson is a recipient of the Frost Medal, the NSK Neustadt Award, the NCTE Poetry Award, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and Poet-in-Residence of The Poets Corner at he Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. Her most recently published books are My Seneca Village and American Ace

Frank X Walker is a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, a Cave Canem fellow, and Editor of PLUCK!. The author of nine collections of poetry and a recipient of a Lannan Foundation Poetry Fellowship, Walker is Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Martha Collins’s most recent book of poems is Night Unto Night. She has also published eight earlier poetry collections and three co-translated volumes of Vietnamese poetry. She is editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and an editor for the Oberlin College Press.