Poetry READINGS and EVENTS

The Poetry Center at PCCC offers readings as part of the Distinguished Poets Series. It also hosts readings with poets who have been finalists and winners of contests and awards sponsored by the Center, including The Paterson Poetry Prize and The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. There is an annual reading to celebrate the latest issue of the Paterson Literary Review and for occasional anthologies sponsored by the Center. Many of the readings and workshops offered at The Poetry Center are also featured on Maria Mazziotti Gillan's blog.

The Poetry Center will be holding both virtual readings and in-person events. The Zoom links for virtual events will take you to the live event and later to the archived recording.

Virtual readings begin at 2:30 PM ET unless otherwise noted below.

In-person readings begin at 1 PM in the Hamilton Club unless otherwise noted below. (directions to Hamilton Club)

Recent readings from the Poetry Center and archived videos from years past are now available on the Poetry Center at PCCC’s YouTube Channel.

Poetry workshops are conducted by most of the featured poets before their readings. For more information on how to register, see the Workshops page.

11/2/2024 Publication Celebration Paterson Literary Review #52

Join a group of poets published in the latest annual issue of PLR for a reading at 1 pm.

12/7/2024 Saida Agostini & Marie Howe

Saida Agostini is a queer Afro-Guyanese poet whose work explores how Black folks harness mythology to enter the fantastic. Her work is featured or forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem a Day, Poet Lore, Plume, amongst others. Saida’s work can be found in several anthologies, including Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Sexuality and Joy.  Her first full length collection let the dead in was released by Alan Squire Publishing (March 2022). A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, Saida is a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee and Best of the Net Finalist. She lives online at www.saidaagostini.com.

Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, New and Selected Poems; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.

1/18/2025 Zoom Reading - Tony Medina

Tony Medina was born in the South Bronx, raised in the Throgs Neck Housing projects, and is a Veteran of the United States Army. Recently appointed Associate Chair and Director of Creative Writing in the Department of Literature and Writing at Howard University, he holds a master’s and PhD from Binghamton University, SUNY. A multi-genre author/editor of 25 award-winning books for adults and young people, Medina’s work appears in over 160 anthologies and journals, including “Seven Steps to Heaven Haiku” and “I’ve Got the Covid Blues,” featured in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. Among Medina’s recent titles are the Black Lives Matter anthology, Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky (anthology); Death, With Occasional Smiling (poetry); Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Boy (children’s); I Am Alfonso Jones (graphic novel); Che Che Colé (fiction); and his Gaza suite, Because the Sky (Sable Books, 2024). His other titles, Serious Trouble: Poems Selected, Poems New and Everywhere Drums: Poets from the Black Arts to Black Lives Matter (coedited with Mudiwa Pettus) as well as a hybrid collection of poetry, fiction and art, Rock the Bells: For Hip Hop @50 (tome), are forthcoming. 

2/1/2025 Allen Ginsberg 2024 Poetry Awards Reading

An afternoon of contributor readings from the Winners, and some of the Honorable Mention poets.
See the complete list of the 2024 Award Winners, Honorable Mention and Editor’s Choice poems and poets (pdf)

2/15/2025 Zoom Reading - Joshua Bennett

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the black expressive tradition. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.  

3/1/2025 Nicole Cooley & Meghan O’Rourke

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of seven books of poems, most recently MOTHER WATER ASH (Louisiana State University Press 2024), as well as OF MARRIAGE (Alice James Books 2018),  GIRL AFTER GIRL AFTER GIRL (LSU Press 2017), BREACH (LSU Press 2010), and other collections. She has also published two chapbooks and a novel. She has received The Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America.  She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York and lives in New Jersey with her family.

Meghan O’Rourke, award-winning poet, nonfiction writer, and acclaimed editor, is the author of the poetry collections Sun In Days, Once, and Halflife, and the memoirs The Invisible Kingdom and The Long Goodbye. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the inaugural May Sarton Poetry Prize, among her many other awards. Meghan writes for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and is the editor of The Yale Review. She is a graduate of Yale University, where she also teaches.

3/15/2025 Zoom Reading - Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. She is also the author of 3 books of prose: Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs; Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays; and The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin. Beth Ann’s poetry has been in over fifty anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Poets of the New Century, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. She teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

4/5/2025 Paterson Poetry Prize 2024 Winners
a reading with Afaa M. Weaver & Mahogany Browne

Mahogany L. Browne, a Kennedy Center’s Next 50 fellow, is a writer, playwright, organizer, & educator. Browne received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Hawthornden, Poets House, Mellon Research, Rauschenberg, Wesleyan University, & UCross. Browne’s books include Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for a play by Steppenwolf Theater), Black Girl Magic, and banned books Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice and Woke Baby. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne currently tours Chrome Valley (highlighted in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times) and is the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize winner. She holds an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree awarded by Marymount Manhattan College in 2024, is the inaugural poet-in-residence at Lincoln Center, and is at work on her first adult fiction and fourth YA novel-in-verse in Brooklyn, NY.

Afaa M. Weaver ’s most recent collection of poetry is A Fire in the Hills. His plays include Berea. His awards include the Wallace Stevens, Kingsley Tufts, and St. Botolph’s 2019 Distinguished Artist, as well as medals from the Beijing Writers Association, and Taiwan’s Artists and Writers Association. Afaa is a Guggenheim fellow, a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, professor emeritus at Simmons University, and guest MFA faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. His papers are held in the Howard Gotlieb Center at Boston University. With his wife Kristen Skedgell, Afaa lives in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York.

4/26/2025 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award 2024
Book Launch Reading

Join us as The Poetry Center celebrates the publication launch of the winning book for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award with a reading by the winning poet and finalists. The winning poet is Suzanne Cleary for her manuscript The Odds. Her collection will be published in Spring 2025 by NYQ Books. This award includes a $5,000 prize, 25 author copies, and a featured reading at the book’s release. The five finalists and their manuscript titles are: Rowhome in Flickering Light, Daniel Donaghy;  A Brief History of My Sex Life, Subhaga Crystal Bacon; BREASTS/MOM  Emily Hyland; Smolder, Colleen Morton Busch; All the Wrong Things, Susan Rothbard.
See laurabosspoetryfoundation.org for information on the Foundation’s work and the manuscript award.

5/3/2025 Kwame Dawes & Maya C. Popa

Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022, Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2024-2027).

Maya C. Popa is the author of two collections, Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) named one of the Guardian’srecent best books of poetry, and American Faith (Sarabande, 2019), runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and winner of the North American Book Prize. Her poems and essays appear in The Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. She holds a PhD on the role of wonder in poetry from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was a recipient of the English department bursary for exceptional merit. She was previously a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford University, where she earned her MA, and is a Veterans Fellows at NYU, where she earned her MFA. Her newsletter, Poetry Today, is one of Substack’s best-selling featured publications. Since 2018, she has served as the Poetry Editor of Publishers Weekly and Director of Creative Writing at the Nightingale-Bamford School. She teaches advanced poetry at NYU.