Readings & Talks Featuring Shane McCrae and Vievee Francis

On February 9, 2021  the Lannan Center presented a Crowdcast webinar featuring  Shane McCrae and Vievee Francis. Introductions by Lannan Fellows Joshua Kim and Renny Simone. Moderated by Carolyn Forché.

Shane McCrae is the author of seven books of poetry, including Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015), winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Vievee Francis was born in West Texas. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. She is the author of Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006). The poet Adrian Matejka describes her poems as “revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history.” The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Kresge Foundation, Francis currently serves as an editor for Callaloo and teaches English and creative writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Music: Quantum Jazz — "Orbiting A Distant Planet" — Provided by Jamendo.