These events are co-sponsored by the Yale Collection of American Literature and theYale Race & Innovative Poetics Working Group; the roundtable discussion will be chaired by Working Group members Clair Schwartz, Camille Owens, and Maryam Parhizkar.

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, selected by Terrance Hayes for the 2014 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press). He is recipient of a 2014 fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, a 2013 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. From the Poetry Foundation

Ocean Vuong is the author of the poetry collections Night Sky With Exit Wounds (2016) and the chapbooks No (2013) and Burnings (2010), which was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association. In 2014, Vuong was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He received a Whiting Award in 2016. He is on faculty in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  From the Poetry Foundation