Milkweed Presents Keith Wilson with Douglas Kearney & Chaun Webster

Milkweed Presents National Poetry Series selection Games for Children author Keith S. Wilson. Keith will read from his debut and engage in conversation with Minnesota Book Award winners Douglas Kearney and Chaun Webster.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Radiant with a tenderness that is only achieved through close attention, these poems offer witnessing and formalistic exploration as well as a unique cosmology that is made ever more expansive by blurred lines between the instructional and the improvisational. For Keith Wilson, no image, thought, stanza, or diagram is sufficient in the practice of illumination, so he combines them. The Uncanny Valley diagram is repurposed to imagine a future Emmett Till never saw; visual instructions for line dancing stand in tension with the memory of Wilson’s grandfather picking cotton; prayer is input as equation; a poem gerrymanders a sentence diagram. In these and other gestures, Wilson expands the possibility of what poetry can hold.

Thematically expansive and materially ambidextrous, Games for Children demonstrates how play is one of the highest forms of freedom, and in reclaiming it, our most tender truths are exposed.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow.

Douglas Kearney has published nine books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner and a National Book Award, Pen America, and Kingsley Tufts Award finalist. Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), is the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: “[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” M. NourbeSe Philip calls Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito, 2016), “a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” Starts Spinning (Rain Taxi), a chapbook of poetry, saw publication in 2019. A Howard University and CalArts alum, Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul.

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretative limitations of writing to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. webster’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Obsidian, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. webster is the author of Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press) and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (Black Ocean). Both books received the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Without Terminus, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2026 will be webster’s first work of nonfiction.