Featured Guests: Diana Marie Delgado, John Murillo, Nicole Sealey, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Candace Williams

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In the first week of March 2025, Haymarket Books will publish Like A Hammer: Poets on Mass Incarceration, poems of witness from currently and formerly incarcerated poets and the people who love them. As part of a series of launch events for this book we are screening films produced by the Sidney E. Frank Foundation and featuring poets John Murillo, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, Vanessa Angélica Villareal, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Randall Horton, and Sin à tes Souhaits. These films feature poets performing their own work and, in some instances, sharing the work of an incarcerated peer poet from the anthology.

**We ask that all in-person attendees wear masks in the event space during the program for the health and well-being of the speakers and other guests. We will have a reception afterwards with light refreshments and books available for purchase.***

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Bios:

Diana Marie Delgado is a poet, editor, playwright, and the author of Tracing the Horse and Late-Night Talks with Men I Think I Trust. With extensive experience in executive leadership, Delgado is committed to uplifting writers and cultivating vibrant creative communities. She holds degrees from University of California Riverside and Columbia University’s MFA program in poetry, and resides in Tucson, Arizona.

John Murillo is author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. His honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, the Four Quartets Prize from T. S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His translation of Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels is forthcoming from Four Way Books. He is professor of English in the MFA program at Hunter College.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a professor in the department of African-American studies at Princeton University. She is author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by the University of North Carolina Press, a semi-finalist for a National Book Award for nonfiction and a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer in History. Taylor’s book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ nonfiction in 2018. In 2021, Taylor was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship.

Candace Williams is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. I Am the Most Dangerous Thing (Alice James Books, 2023) is their debut full-length poetry collection. Candace earned their Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Claremont McKenna College and Master of Arts in Education from Stanford University. They grew up in the Pacific Northwest and found love and poetry in Brooklyn, New York. Now, Candace lives and makes art in New England.

With Films Featuring

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: A Memoir, Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr., and Dulce, winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the US. He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program. He teaches at St. Mary’s College and Ashland University. He is a 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow.

Randall Horton is the recipient of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction, and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He is a former member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received an American Book Award in Oral Literature. Their musical project, The Baraka Sessions, was named best vocal jazz album by NPR. Randall’s latest collection of poetry {#289-128} is published by the University of Kentucky (2020) and received the American Book Award in 2021. His memoir, Dead Weight: A Memoir in Essays, is published by Northwestern University Press. Randall is also cofounder of Radical Reversal, a music project with an emphasis on justice equity through the investigation of sound. Randall is a Professor of English at the University of New Haven.

Christopher Malec is the Luis Angel Hernandez poet laureate. As a writer of poetry and law, he blends these two worlds together to paint a clearer picture of what social justice needs in America. His work has been featured in Poetry magazine, NPR, and elsewhere. Incarcerated since the age of nineteen, he’s currently serving life without parole.

Evie Shockley is a poet and scholar who thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we, semiautomatic, and the new black. Her work has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and appears internationally. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in such communities as Cave Canem, Poets at the End of the World, and the Community of Writers. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Sin à tes Souhaits, a Black poet, cultural critic, and multimedia artist from East Las Vegas, is the former Clark County Poet Laureate and a fellow of Art for Justice, the Carol C. Harter, Beverly Rogers Black Mountain Institute, Believer magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other institutions. His writing is featured in the Sun, the Believer, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Sin founded and directs ACI Creative, a media consulting firm that works with writers, presses, and literary projects.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where she is working on a poetry and a nonfiction collection while raising her son.