The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series of Hope College will feature poets Tarfia Faizullah and Jamaal May on Thursday, March 3, at 7 p.m. in the John and Dede Howard Recital Hall of the Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts.
There will also be a question-and-answer session in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication earlier in the day, at 3:30 p.m.
The public is invited to both events. Admission is free.
Faizullah is a Bangladeshi-American poet, performer and educator. She was born in
1980 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in west Texas. She received an MFA in poetry
from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of “Seam” (SIU 2014), as well
as “Register of Eliminated Villages,” forthcoming from Graywolf in 2017.
Her honors and awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, as well as scholarships and fellowships from Kundiman, Bread Loaf, Kenyon Review, Sewanee, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Daily, Oxford American, Ploughshares, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Poems have also been anthologized in “Best New Poets 2013” (Meridian), “The Book of Scented Things” (Rose O’Neill Literary House Press), “Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poems for the Next Generation” (Viking/Penguin), and “Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry” (University of Southern Carolina Press). She has also recently had prose in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Foundation and Necessary Fiction.
May’s poetry has been published in Poetry, The Believer, Ploughshares, New England
Review and The Kenyon Review. His work has been recognized by Cave Canem, Bread Loaf,
the Lannan Foundation, and the Indiana Review. He has also been a recipient of the
Kenyon Review Fellowship at Kenyon College, Bread Loaf, Callaloo and the Civitella
Ranieri Fellowship.
His career as an editor and teacher began when he taught poetry in the Detroit public school system. Since then, he has also been on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA. He has served as an associate editor of West Branch and the series editor, graphic designer and filmmaker of the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook and Video Series. May is also a member of six national poetry slam teams, including five from Detroit and the New York City-based LouderARTS team. He is a three-time Rustbelt Regional Slam champion and has been a finalist at several national and international poetry slams.
Additional information about the series can be found online here.
The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street. Jack H. Miller Center for Musical Arts is located at 221 Columbia Ave., between Ninth and 10th streets.