April is National Poetry Month, and we are celebrating with a collection of some of our favorite poetry moments over the years at Literary Arts. We will hear from a Portland high school student, the United States poet laureate, an Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient, a Nobel Prize winner, and more.
Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate, speaks at Portland Arts & Lectures in April 2023 about how important reading poetry has been to her in connecting to herself and to the natural world, and how she came to poetry as young girl.
Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney shares one of his early poems and the story behind it at Portland Arts & Lectures, two decades before Ada Limón, in 2002. And Danica Leung, who was a junior at Lincoln High School at the time, reads her poem at Verselandia 2021.
Oregon Literary Fellowship recipient Genevive DeGuzman moderates a conversation from Portland Book Festival 2022 featuring Shelley Wong, author of As She Appears, and Tayi Tibble, author of Poukahangatus, talking about ancestry, identity, and pop culture references in their work.
In 2022, Literary Arts hosted an event with the Alano Club of Portland and their Artists in Recovery series. At that event, poet Hanif Abdurraqib shared work from his then-forthcoming, but now just-published, new book There’s Always This Year. And Li-Young Lee appeared at Portland Arts & Lectures in 2008, and shared his poem, “Virtues of the Boring Husband.”
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book, A Little Devil in America, was the winner of the Carnegie Medal and the Gordon Burns Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Award. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us was named a book of the year by NPR, Esquire, BuzzFeed, O: The Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist, and longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.
Genevieve DeGuzman writes poetry and fiction. She has been a recipient of fellowships and grants from Oregon Arts Commission, PEN America, Literary Arts, Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency, Vermont Studio Center, and Can Serrat, among others. Most recently, Genevieve was awarded the 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowship and was featured in the Cultural Landscape Series portraiture project for Oregon ArtsWatch. As a poet, Genevieve won the Atticus Review contest selected by Roberto Carlos Garcia and earned nominations for the Best New Poets anthology. Her work appears in Folio, Iron Horse Literary Review, Nimrod, RHINO, phoebe, Strange Horizons, and has been featured in the Poetry Moves program for C-TRAN. Born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, she now lives in Portland, OR.
Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” Robert Lowell praised Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Heaney taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as the Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He died in 2013.
Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His family settled in the United States in 1964. He is the author of Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award; The City in Which I Love You (1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; The Winged Seed (1995); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; and Behind My Eyes (2008). Lee has been the recipient of the Lannan Literary Award; the Whiting Writers’ Award; the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; the I. B. Lavan Award; three Pushcart Prizes; grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 1998, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from State University of New York at Brockport. He lives in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Donna, and their two sons.
Danica Leung graduated from Lincoln High School in 2022. She performed her poem at Verselandia! 2021.
Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the 24th Poet Laureate of The United States and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. As the Poet Laureate, her signature project is called You Are Here and focuses on how poetry can help connect us to the natural world.
Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2017, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize in Creative Writing. Her second book of poetry, Rangikura, was published in the United States in 2024. Her first book of poetry is Poukahangatus.
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
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