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.
Please note that space is limited.
This program is made possible through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.
About the Poets
Timothy Donnelly teaches in the writing program of the Columbia University School of the Arts. His most recent book, Chariot, was published in 2023. His previous collections include The Problem of the Many, winner of the inaugural Big Other Poetry Prize, and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His poems have been widely published, translated, and anthologized, and he is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and the Paris Review’s Bernard F. Connors Prize, as well as fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, the James Merrill House Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and the New York State Writers Institute. He lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Kimiko Hahn teaches in the MFA program for creative writing and literary translation at Queens College, City University of New York. She has cast a wide net for subject matter over her eleven collections. In The Ghost Forest: new and selected poems, she plays with given forms while creating new ones and, in doing so, honors past writers. Reflecting her interest in Japanese poetics, her essay on the zuihitsu was published in the American Poetry Review. Hahn is the 2023 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation. At present, she is co-editing an anthology of zuihitsu.
Michael Kelleher is the author of four collections of poetry, including Museum Hours, whose four sections are imagined as rooms in a museum; Visible Instruments; Human Scale; and To Be Sung. His poems and essays have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, the Harvard Review, Here, and elsewhere magazine. He is the director of the Windham-Campbell Prizes at Yale and the former artistic and associate director of Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, NY.
Meghan O’Rourke (Yale BA 1997) is a professor of creative writing at Yale University and editor of the Yale Review. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction, as well as the memoir The Long Goodbye. Her most recent book of poetry, Sun in Days, was named one of the ten best poetry books of 2017 by the New York Times. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Front Page award for cultural criticism, and other honors, she writes for the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other publications.
Vijay Seshadri teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Born in Bangalore, India, he moved to America at the age of five. He is the author of Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, The Disappearances, 3 Sections, and That Was Now, This Is Then, as well as many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. His work has been widely published and anthologized and recognized with many honors, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and, in 2015, the Literature Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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
