The Woodberry Poetry Room invites you to Wax Poetics, a series that brings together our landmark AV collection with readings by contemporary poets. This season, Ishion Hutchinson will join us in honoring renowned Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite (1930-2020), whose masterworks The Arrivants and Equinox are forthcoming from New Directions in July 2026. The event will be introduced by Sunbinn Lee, PhD candidate in the Department of English, Harvard University.

The evening will begin with Hutchinson sharing selections from his own work alongside recently digitized recordings of Brathwaite from the Poetry Room’s archives. We’ll then move to the adjacent Poetry Room for an immersive, collective listening session, book signing, and reception. 

In-Person Attendance: Forum Room, Lamont Library, Harvard University. 
Book sales provided by Grolier Poetry Book Shop. Free and open to the public. 
  

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel. 

Ishion Hutchinson is the winner of the 2025 Rilke Prize for his book-length poem, School of Instructions, for which he was also shortlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. His other collections include House of Lords and Commons, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, as well as a book of essays, Fugitive Tilts. A finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award in Poetry, his awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the Susannah Hunnewell Prize from The Paris Review, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and Institute of Jamaica’s Gold Musgrave Medal for distinguished contributions to literature. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he is a co-founding member of the Global Black Initiative Collective at Cornell University, where he is currently the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities and a trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize. 

Please 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. We encourage persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access to contact Houghton Library at least three days in advance of the reading.