Longfellow Summer Arts Festival: Major Jackson & Kirun Kapur
Join us for an afternoon with poets Major Jackson and Kirun Kapur! This reading is part of the second and culminating summer of We (too) The People project, an NEPC collaboration with the Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters.
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (Blue Flower Arts, 2023), The Absurd Man (W.W. Norton & Company, 2020), Roll Deep (W.W. Norton & Company, 2015), Holding Company (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), Hoops (W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. Jackson’s edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019 (Scribner), Renga for Obama (Harvard Review Monographs, 2017), and the Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems (2013). He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli (University of Michigan Press, 2022).
A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson was awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award and received honors from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion magazine, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, Poetry London, and ZYZZYVA.
Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He hosts The Slowdown podcast, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and American Public Media, and is poetry editor of the Harvard Review.
Kirun Kapur‘s first collection, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist, was awarded the 2013 Antivenom Poetry Award and was a finalist for the Mass Book Prize. Her newest book, Women in the Waiting Room, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Kapur was awarded the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize, and the Glenna Luschei Award, as well as fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell Colony. She serves as the editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, and teaches at Amherst College, where she is the director of the Creative Writing Program.
The Longfellow Summer Arts Festival brings music, poetry, and community to the East Lawn of the Longfellow House on Sunday afternoons through the summer. All events are free and open to the public. For directions, parking, and accessibility information, see the Festival page.
In case of inclement weather, the reading will be moved indoors.