Poetry at Beinecke Library

Poetry collections, events, and news.

Eight writers awarded Yale’s Windham-Campbell Prizes
April 2, 2024
The recipients are, in fiction, Deirdre Madden (Ireland) and Kathryn Scanlan (United States); in nonfiction, Christina Sharpe (Canada/United States) and Hanif Abdurraqib (United States); in drama, Christopher Chen (United States) and Sonya Kelly (Ireland); and in poetry, m. nourbeSe Philip (Canada/Trinidad and Tobago) and Jen Hadfield (Canada/United Kingdom).
Visit by acclaimed poet invites engagement with an artist’s many dimensions
February 14, 2024
Poet, musician, and playwright Cornelius Eady, whose papers are at the Beinecke Library, visits next week for a series of performances and class discussions.
Langston Hughes's "China" Why the previously unpublished poem is a revelation
January 31, 2024
During the summer of 2019, I was wading through the Langston Hughes papers in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale for a book I am writing on Afro-Asian encounters in the twentieth century.
Martin Luther King Jr. helped to change America, with poet Langston Hughes’ help (Sedona Red Rock News)
January 13, 2024
King and Hughes maintained a friendship until Hughes’ death in May 1967, even traveling together to Nigeria in November 1960. Hughes wrote about King’s civil rights efforts in at least 40 articles in the Chicago Defender and penned several poems about King’s activities. King quoted or paraphrased at least seven Hughes poems in various speeches before he was assassinated in April 1968, according to W. Jason Miller’s book, “Origins of the Dream: Hughes’s Poetry and King’s Rhetoric.” Hughes had written his poem “Harlem” in 1951, which begins, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?”
Poetry that shakes your heart
January 1, 2024
A colleague remembers Louise Glück (1943-2023), the Nobel Prize-winning poet and Yale professor.
Poem: I look at the world (New York Times)
November 30, 2023
This poem by Langston Hughes was discovered by a rare-books cataloger in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It was scrawled in the pages of a book called “An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry.” The poem itself could be an entry. The speaker, a Black person, sees the world as a “fenced-off narrow space,” an unnecessarily walled place, and resolves to obliterate cruel boundaries. It’s a timeless sort of gesture, at home in the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement — or now.
Louise Glück, Nobel laureate and beloved Yale mentor
October 13, 2023
Louise Glück, a poet whose evocative voice shaped the literary world for decades, earning her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, and who became a beloved teacher and mentor as a member of the Yale faculty, died Oct. 13 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 80.
Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry (Connecticut Public Radio)
February 22, 2023
Yale University has announced that Joy Harjo is the winner of the 2023 Bollinger Prize for American Poetry. The biennial prize is awarded to an American poet for the best book of poems published in the previous two years, or for lifetime achievement in poetry. Harjo won on both counts—for her book Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years, and for her lifetime achievement in and contributions to American poetry. This after being U.S. Poet Laureate between 2019 and 2022.
Festival encourages writers of all stripes (The Beacon)
February 21, 2023
As part of this year’s CityLit Festival, Joy Harjo (left), the winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and former Poet Laureate of the United States, will be giving a reading of her poetry and conversing with a local poet on Tuesday, March 28, at Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater.
Joy Harjo wins Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for Poetry
February 14, 2023
Joy Harjo has been named the winner of Yale’s 2023 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. The Bollingen Prize, established by Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by Yale University Library through Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. The prize includes a cash award of $175,000.