EventsCommon Ground#718

Publishing-in-Transit: The Poetry Project

Featuring Kyle Dacuyan, Ethan Philbrick, Patricia Spears Jones, and Cole Swensen

Thursday, December 22, 2022 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

The Poetry Project’s Executive Director Kyle Dacuyan, former curator Ethan Philbrick, and former staff Patricia Spears Jones join Rail contributor Cole Swensen for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading.

In this Talk

Kyle Dacuyan

Photo by Amelia Golden

Poet, performer, and translator Kyle Dacuyan is the author of Incitements (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022). His poems appear in the Brooklyn Rail, DIAGRAM, Lambda Literary, Best New Poets, among other places. He is the recipient of scholarships from Poets House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Academy of American Poets, and is a 2021 NEA Fellow in Literature. Dacuyan is the Executive Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s and lives in New York City.

Ethan Philbrick

Photo by Amelia Golden

Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, artist, and writer. His book, Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence, was published in April of 2023 by Fordham University Press. Projects include Slow Dances (with Anh Vo, Tess Dworman, Niall Jones, Tara Aisha Willis, nibia pastrana santiago, and Moriah Evans) at The Kitchen and Montez Press; DAYS, Mutual Aid Among Animals (with Ned Riseley) at the Armory; Song in an Expanding Field at The Poetry Project; Case at Rashid Johnson and Creative Time’s Red Stage; The Gay Divorcees (with Robbie Acklen, Lauren Bakst, Lauren Denitzio, Paul Legault, Joshua Thomas Lieberman, Ita Segev, and Julia Steinmetz); and March is for Marches (with Morgan Bassichis) at Triple Canopy. Philbrick holds a PhD in performance studies from NYU.

Patricia Spears Jones

Poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist Patricia Spears Jones is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of The Beloved Community, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press and ten other poetry collections. Her work is in numerous anthologies such as African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song and in publications including The New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. She edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets. She has taught at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, CUNY, Barnard College, and elsewhere. She is organizer of the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.

http://psjones.com/

Cole Swensen

Photo by Anthony Hayward

Cole Swensen is the author of twenty volumes of poetry, most recently And And And (Shearsman Books, 2023), which was long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a collection of critical essays, Noise That Stays Noise. A book of hybrid poem-essays, Art in Time, was published by Nightboat in 2021. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Award and has been awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, the SF State Poetry Center Book Award, and the National Poetry Series. She has also translated over twenty volumes of poetry, prose, and art criticism from French and won the 2024 ALTA National Translation Award and the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Translation Award.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨