Favorite Poems: Wheatley, Carroll

Brenda Shaughnessy with Simone Teicher and Cornelius Eady

At the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference this year, our team at tatestreet.org were excited to kick off a new collaboration between Tate Street, Robert Pinsky, and the Favorite Poem Project (favoritepoem.org). The FPP was created by Robert Pinsky during his time as Poet Laureate (1997-2000) of the United States to celebrate and document the role of poetry in the lives of Americans. Tate Street filmed a new and more informal branch of the FPP’s online collection of short video documentaries. These videos showcase individuals reading and speaking personally about their favorite poems. Robert Pinsky, the Favorite Poem Project and Tate Street selected a diverse group of readers from the writing conference—composed of editors, translators, educators, fiction writers, and poets—to participate at AWP 2015.

Read “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll.

About the Reader

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press) a New York Times’ 100 Notable Book and a finalist for the Griffin International Prize. Her other books are Human Dark with Sugar (James Laughlin Award recipient and finalist for the NBCC Award) and Interior with Sudden Joy. Her poems appeared in Best American Poetry, Harpers, Slate.com, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, T magazine, The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Poetry, and elsewhere. She was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 2013 and is Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark.

Read “On Being Brought from Africa to America” by Phillis Wheatley. 

About the Reader

Poet, playwright and songwriter Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is the author of several poetry collections: Kartunes; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don’t Miss Your Water; The Autobiography of a Jukebox; Brutal Imagination; and most recently, Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Traveling Scholarship, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. His work appears in many journals, magazines, and the anthologies Every Shut Eye Ain’t Asleep, In Search of Color Everywhere, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry, (1750-2000). In 2013 he released two poetry/music chapbooks, BOOK OF HOOKS, VOL 1 & 2 (Kattywompus Press), and ASKING FOR THE MOON (Red Glass Press). He is a co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation and is currently The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.

Website: http://www.corneliuseadyandroughmagic.com
Twitter: @roughband