Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.
Note: Several of these sonnets have been adapted by Hayes for a new song cycle that composer Tyshawn Sorey has written for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee. “Cycles of My Being,” which explores the realities of life as a black man in America, will have its world premiere at the Opera of Philadelphia on February 20th, and will also be performed at the Lyric Opera of Chicago on February 22 and at Carnegie Hall on April 24.
Mary Karr is a poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University. Her latest book is Tropic of Squalor: Poems, out in May from Harper.