PVLF 2025

National Book Award-winning Poet will Read at SRPR. Lucia Getsi's Poetry Reading, April 10

Experience award-winning poets John Keene and Marissa Davis at the SRPR Lucia Getsi Poetry Reading in Bloomington-Normal. Join us for an inspiring literary event!
on Mar 22, 2024

On Wednesday, April 10, the annual SRPR Lucia Getsi Poetry Reading will be held in Bloomington-Normal by award-winning poets John Keene and Marissa Davis. The poetry reading begins at 7 p.m. at the Normal Theater in Uptown Normal. The reading will be followed by a book signing. Keene received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry for Punks: New and Selected Poems, as well as the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" prize. Marissa Davis won the 2023 SRPR Editors' Prize for her poetry Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish.

On April 10 at 3 p.m., Keene will speak with IWU Professor Joanne Diaz in the Beckman Auditorium of the Ames Library at Illinois Wesleyan University. Both programs are completely free and accessible to the public.

ABOUT THE POETS.

JOHN KEENE is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems, which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, a 2022 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and was longlisted for the 2022 Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize; Counternarratives, which received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Windham He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, he is Distinguished Professor and serves as department chair at Rutgers University-Newark.

John Keene, who received a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship in October 2018, is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions, 1995); the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), a collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; and the short fiction collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received the inaugural 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses (in the United Kingdom), as well as a 2016 American Book Award, a 2016 Lannan Literary. Keene's other publications include GRIND (ITI Press, 2016), an art-text collaboration with photographer Nicholas Muellner, and the poetry chapbook Playland (Seven Kitchens Press, 2016).

His fiction, poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in a variety of journals, and he has received numerous awards, including a 2003 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Poetry Fellowship, a 2005 Whiting Foundation Award in Fiction and Poetry, and a 2008 Pan-African Literary Forum Fellowship for Distinguished First Poetry Collection. Keene's introduction to the first English translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst's novel The Obscene Madame D was published in 2012 by Nightboat Books/A Bolha Editora, and his translation from Portuguese of Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer was published in 2014 by the same company. His essay "Translating Poetry, Translating Blackness" appeared on the Poetry Foundation's website in 2016, and his essay "Translating Brazil's Marquise de Sade," on Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst, appeared in Essays on Hilda Hilst: Between Brazil and World Literature, edited by Adam Morris and Bruno Carvalho and published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Keene, a longtime member of the Dark Room Writers Collective of Cambridge and Boston, and a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, has taught at Brown University, Northwestern University, where he served as director of the undergraduate creative writing program and acting co-director of the M.A./M.F.A. in creative writing program, among other institutions.

He sat on the initial juries for the Cave Canem Second Book Prize and the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, both of which are published by Northwestern University Press. He is the fiction and hybrid writing editor at the literary journal Obsidian, an advising editor for Transition, and a contributing editor for the James Baldwin Review. He also serves on the planning and organizing committees, as well as the publication jury, for the African Poetry Book Series, which includes the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and is sponsored by the African Poetry Book Fund at the University of Nebraska and Prairie Schooner.

MARISSA DAVIS is a writer, translator, editor, and teacher from Paducah, Kentucky. She now lives in Brooklyn, New York, after previously living in Nashville, Tennessee and Paris, France. She earned her M.F.A. in poetry at New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow.
Davis is the author of My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning to Speak (Jai-Alai Books, 2020), which won Cave Canem's 2019 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, chosen by poet Danez Smith.

Her writing has appeared in Poetry, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Rattle, West Branch, Mississippi Review, Muzzle Magazine, Frontier Poetry, and Best New Poets, among other publications. Her translations have been published or are forthcoming in Northwest Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Mid-American Review, The Common, Rhino, American Chordata, and The Offing. Her writing has earned her the following honors: runner-up in Narrative Magazine's 30 Below Contest, winner of Mississippi Review's poetry contest, an Indiana Review contest finalist, a Black Warrior Review contest finalist, a Tin House scholarship, and a Stegner Fellowship (though she did not attend the program due to personal reasons). In 2021, she was chosen to judge the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Davis works as an editor, both freelance (for university applications and creative writing) and salaried (as an assistant at Penguin Random House).

ABOUT THE SRPR LUCIA GETSI READING SERIES

Longtime SRPR Editor and Illinois State University Distinguished Professor Emerita Lucia Getsi established and endowed the SRPR Lucia Getsi Reading in 2013, making it one of Central Illinois' top poetry events. Previous readers include Jerome Rothenberg, Kristin Prevallet, Rachel Jamison Webster, Chloe Garcia Roberts, Ruben Quesada, Ann Hudson, Roger Reeves, Julie Marie Wade, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Ewa Chrusciel, Emma Bolden, Monica Hand, Jason Bredle, Jacob Saenz, Bill Stobb, Joshua Corey, and many more.

Event Sponsors

The SRPR Lucia Getsi Poetry Reading is supported by the Harold K. Sage Fund and the Illinois State University Foundation, as well as Lucia Getsi, SRPR, the Publications Unit, the Department of English at Illinois State University, and the Department of English at Illinois Wesleyan University.