The Woodberry Poetry Room welcomes you to its first Vocarium Reading of the season: a reading by Layli Long Soldier (author of Whereas) and Nicole Sealey (author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure). Introductory remarks will be delivered by poet and scholar Keith Jones.

An informal reception and book-signing (provided by Grolier Poetry Book Shop) will follow the event.
 

In-Person Attendance:  Edison Newman Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Free and open to the public. 

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel at 6:00pm (Eastern Standard Time).


ABOUT LAYLI LONG SOLDIER: Long Soldier holds a B.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. She is the author of Chromosomory (Q Avenue Press, 2010) and Whereas (Graywolf Press, 2017). She is a mentor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

ABOUT NICOLE SEALEY: Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. An excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, and the NEA. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry (2018 and 2021). She was the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation from 2017–2019. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in NYU's MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program. 

We welcome you to contact us with any questions about this event. We can be reached by email at poetryrm@fas.harvard.edu or via phone at (617) 495-2454. Persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access may contact Houghton Library's Administrative Coordinator Le Huong Huynh by email or at 617-495-2443 in advance of the reading.