Enjoy a display of exceptional poetry showcasing new collections by Cave Canem faculty member Tim Seibles, friend Safiya Sinclair and fellow Jacqueline Allen Trimble. Heralded by Martin Espada as “a poet of extraordinary sensitivity,” Tim Seibles is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017). Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), which Publisher’s Weekly calls a “stunning debut collection.” Jacqueline Allen Trimble‘s debut collection American Happiness was published by NewSouth Books in 2016 and recognized by Mark Childress as “timely and timeless, elegant and brutal, wise and innocent.” Free and open to the public. Refreshments served. Co-sponsored with The New School Creative Writing Program.
Tim Seibles is the author of six collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), and Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. His latest work of poetry, One Turn Around the Sun was published by Etruscan Press in 2017. His poems have been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.
Safiya Sinclair is a poet and librettist born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year,” and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sinclair’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, fellowships from Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia, and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
Jacqueline Allen Trimble is a Cave Canem Fellow and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals including The Louisville Review, The Offing, and Blue Lake Review. Published by NewSouth Books, American Happiness, won the 2016 Balcones Poetry Prize. Jennifer Horne, the poet laureate of Alabama, wrote about the collection “Her grace is in the anger distilled to the bitter draft you savor as it bites,” and Honoree Jeffers, the 2018 Harper Lee Award Winner for Alabama’s Distinguished Writer, said, “I longed for her kind of poetry, these cut-to-the flesh poems, this verse that sings the old time religion of difficult truths with new courage and utter sister-beauty. And I am so grateful for her gift, her grown-woman poetics.” Trimble lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.