The Third Thursday Poetry Series & Other Literary Events are sponsored by the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, Department of English, and Southern Humanities Review in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University; the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Auburn University; and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Refreshments will be available at 6 PM; the reading will begin at 6:30 PM. Book sales are provided by Auburn Oil Co. Booksellers.
August 29, 2024: Local Readers
Ken Autrey is an Emeritus Professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, where he taught poetry, creative nonfiction, and advanced composition. His work has appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review, and many other journals. In addition to Penelope in Repose, winner of the 2021 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest (Evening Street Press), he has published three chapbooks: Pilgrims (Main Street Rag), Rope Lesson (Longleaf Press), and The Wake of the Year (Solomon and George).
Ernest L. Gibson III received his PhD in Afro-American studies from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He is the author of Salvific Manhood: James Baldwin’s Novelization of Male Intimacy (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and has published on James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Scandal. An interdisciplinary scholar by training, his research lies at the intersections of literary, cultural, and queer theories, and often pivots on questions of manhood, masculinity, and vulnerability. He is currently at work on his second book project, tentatively entitled, Dark Penmanship: Afro-Ontology, Resistance, and Freedom.
Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kyiv, Ukraine and moved to the United States as a child. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her debut novel, Oksana, Behave! was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in 2019 and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick as well as a best spring read according to Oprah Magazine, InStyle, Pop Sugar, and The Wall Street Journal. Her second novel, Something Unbelievable, was published by Random House in April 2021 and was praised in the New York Times and called a best spring read according to PureWow, AV Club, Paperback Paris, Alma, and Bustle. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Auburn University and the Fiction Editor of the Southern Humanities Review.
September 19, 2024: Catherine Carter and Brian Gastle
Catherine Carter is the author of three full-length collections of poetry–Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, and The Memory of Gills, all with LSU Press–and a chapbook–Marks of the Witch, with Jacar Press. A professor of English at Western Carolina University, Catherine teaches creative writing and English Education. She is also the interim managing editor for Cider Press Review and serves as the Jackson County representative of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.
Brian Gastle is Professor of English at Western Carolina University where he teaches medieval literature, professional writing, and research methods. Has served as Department Head, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, and Interim Associate Provost. He is the recipient of WCU’s University Scholar Award and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
October 3, 2024: Witness Poetry Prize
Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York featuring Victoria Chang and Erika Jing. Presented by the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, 901 South College Street.
November 21, 2024: Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir is an Indo-Caribbean American author of three acclaimed poetry collections, The Taxidermist’s Cut, Cowherd’s Son, Cutlish, and Whale Aria;a book of translation, I Even Regret Night; and his hybrid memoir, Antiman. He is winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize, a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, finalists for the 2017 and 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, finalist for the 2022 PEN Open Book Award, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry. He received his MFA in Poetry and Translation from Queens College, CUNY and his PhD in English from the University of Hawai`i. Rajiv is currently a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
January 23, 2025: Todd Boss
Todd Boss is an author, installation artist, inventor, librettist, podcaster, and film producer in Minneapolis. His fourth poetry collections from W. W. Norton & Co. is Someday the Plan of a Town (2022). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and NPR. His first children’s book, The Boy Who Said Wow, was released in 2023 from Simon & Schuster’s Beach Lane imprint. His work has been recognized with Grammy nominations, Emmy awards, and by the National Book Foundation. He is the founding Artistic Director of Motionpoems, a production company that has turned more than 150 contemporary poems into short films. His podcast, There’s a Poem in That, launched in 2023. In 2018, he sold all his possessions and circled the globe in a series of 30+ house-sits.
February 4-5, 2025: Claudia Rankine
Tuesday, February 4 • 6 PM • The Jule
Claudia Rankine in conversation with Ashley M. Jones
Wednesday, February 5 • 4 PM • Mell Library Room 4550
Open Q&A
Wednesday, February 5 • 6:30 PM • Telfair Peet Theatre
Reading and Conversation • Reception at 5:30 PM
SPONSORS • Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities, Department of English, School of Communication and Journalism, Department of History, Department of Theatre and Dance, and African American and Africana Studies in the College of Liberal Arts; and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.
Recipient of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Her first published play, The White Card, was published with Graywolf Press in 2019. She also co-produces a video series, “The Situation,” alongside John Lucas, and is the founder of the Open Letter Project: Race and the Creative Imagination. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. Her most recent publication, Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020), is a collection of essays where Rankine questions what it means in these spaces to interrogate white privilege, well-meaning liberal politics, white male aggression, the implications of blondness, white supremacy in the White House, the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, and the alarming move toward Brexit.
Rankine’s bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014), uses poetry, essay, cultural criticism, and visual images, to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society. A defining text for our time, Citizen was the winner of the 2015 Forward Prize for Best Collection, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (it was also a finalist in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the NAACP Image Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the LA Times Book Award for poetry. Citizen was nominated for the Hurston/Wright 2015 Legacy Award, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award, and was selected as an NPR Best Book of 2014, who stated: “This collection examines everyday encounters with racism in the second person, forcing the reader—regardless of identity—to engage a narrative haunted by the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Renisha McBride.” Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category.
In all of her work, whether writing about intimacy or alienation, Rankine’s voice is one of unrelenting candor, and her poetry is some of the most innovative and thoughtful work to emerge in recent years. Her work often crosses genres as it tracks wild and precise movements of mind. In the words of the Judges Citation for the Jackson Prize: “The moral vision of Claudia Rankine’s poetry is astounding. In a body of work that pushes the boundaries of the contemporary lyric, Rankine has managed to make space for meditation and vigorous debate upon some of the most relevant and troubling social themes of the 20th and 21st centuries….These poems do the work of art of the highest order—teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader.”
Her other poetry collections are Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2008); the award-winning Nothing in Nature is Private; The End of the Alphabet; and Plot, wherein she welds the cerebral and the spiritual, the sensual and the grotesque. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—a multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and image—is an experimental and deeply personal exploration of the condition of fragmented selfhood in contemporary America. Rankine is also the author of the play, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, which is performed on a bus ride through the Bronx. The New York Times calls it an “engrossing urban adventure, which does not conform to the standard formula for theater but does make the bustle outside the bus throb with history, mystery and meaning, as the best live performances do.”
Rankine co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and her work is included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project Newsletter.
Rankine is also the playwright for The White Card, a meticulously crafted story, which raises uncomfortable questions about what is — and who are — on display. Exploring contemporary headlines and cultural touchstones, Claudia Rankine’s The White Card unpacks the insidious ways in which racism manifests itself in everyday situations and questions how our society can can progress if whiteness stays invisible.
A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York.
February 20, 2025: Cindy Juyoung Ok
Cindy Juyoung Ok is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize. A MacDowell Fellow, her poems have been published in The Nation, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Ok was a finalist for a 2022 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, has served as a Poetry Foundation Library Forms & Features visiting teaching artist, and was a reviewer for Harriet Books in 2022-2023.
March 20, 2025: Southern Humanities Review Spring Sessions
Julia Phillips is the author of the bestselling novels Bear and Disappearing Earth, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year. Julia's work has been translated into twenty-six languages. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review. She is on the board of the Crime Victims Treatment Center, a nonprofit that helps people heal from violence. She teaches at the Randolph College MFA program and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Born in Nixburg, Alabama, Rodney Terich Leonard is the author of Sweetgum & Lightning (Four Way Books). His next collection, Another Land of My Body, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. An Air Force veteran who served during the Gulf War, his society profiles and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Red River Review, The Huffington Post, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, Poems in the Afterglow, Poetry Foundation Online, The Southern Review, What Rough Beast, Four Way Review, The New York Times, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, For Colored Boys… (anthology edited by Keith Boykin) and other publications. He holds degrees from The New School, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Teachers College Columbia University. A Callaloo poetry fellow, he received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University and currently lives in Manhattan.
April 17, 2025
Readings by Graduating Students
May 15, 2025
Readings by Community Members