In connection with the Yale Center for British Art’s exhibition J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality, award-winning contemporary poets read their original works inspired by an object they selected from the exhibition.
About the Poets
Timothy Donnelly is assistant professor and director of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University. He is the poetry editor for Boston Review, the author of several poetry collections, and recipient of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Cloud Corporation (2010).
Kimiko Hahn teaches in the MFA program for creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (2024) and recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2023) from the Poetry Foundation.
Meghan O’Rourke (Yale BA ’97) is a professor of creative writing at Yale University and editor of The Yale Review. She was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction for her New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022). Her Sun in Days was named a top 10 poetry book of 2017 by the New York Times. She writes for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other reviews.
Michael Kelleher is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Visible Instruments (Chax, 2017). He is the director of the Windham-Campbell Literary Prizes at Yale and the former artistic and associate director of Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, NY.
Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, and moved to America at the age of five. He is the author of numerous poetry books, essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. In 2014 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and in 2015, he won the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Top image
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Harlech Castle, from Tygwyn Ferry, Summer's Evening Twilight, 1799, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
