One of Three Conversations on Contemporary Biography: Writing about Writers, co-sponsored by the Beinecke Library and Public Humanities at Yale.
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/38V8xz1
Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale and poetry editor of The American Scholar. His books include Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism and James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015), which won the Lamda Literary Award for Gay Biography and was chosen by Dwight Garner as one of his ten best books of the year for The New York Times. With Stephen Yenser, he edited A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a former fellow of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. His Modern Poetry course is available on Yale Open Courses. He is currently at work on a critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop.
Terrance Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University and a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. His most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float in the Space Between is based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight: Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation “as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself”. It was the winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. The book “ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2018 National Books Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.