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As part of the Poetry and Literature Center’s 75th Anniversary, this new series features emerging and established literary writers in a dynamic and thought-provoking conversation.

“How do you go about finding the heart?”: Aracelis Girmay on Poetry, Discovery, and Grief

Justin Torres

Aracelis Girmay is the author of two collections of poetry including Kingdom Animalia and Teeth, as well as the collage-based picture book, changing, changing. Her honors include the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award and a fellowship from Cave Canem. She has taught youth poetry workshops with Community~Word and DreamYard, and she currently teaches poetry at Hampshire College and in Drew University's low-residency MFA program.

Read Girmay's interview

“The Way You Tell the Story”: Justin Torres on Writing

Justin Torres

Justin Torres’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Glimmer Train and other publications. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a recipient of the Rolón United States Artist Fellowship in Literature and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He has worked as a farmhand, a dog-walker, a creative writing teacher and a bookseller. His debut novel We the Animals is a semiautobiographical story of three brothers, and was released in 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Photo by Gregory Crowley.

Read Torres's interview

Poet Joshua Beckman on Walt Whitman and Influence

Walt Whitman

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of ten books of poetry, three books of poems in translation, and two collaborative works with Mathew Rohrer. Beckman serves as an editor for Wave Press. His many honors include a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts as well as a Pushcart Prize. His most recent work Porch Light, released in 2012, is a limited edition collaboration with Jon Beacham published by The Brother in Elysium Letterpress.

Read Beckman's essay and interview