Keynote Event Speaker
Monday, April 5 · 7 p.m.
TCC Roper Performing Arts Center
Norfolk Campus
Reception and book
signing following

Photo by Christina Koci Hernandez

Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate

Kay Ryan was appointed as the Library of Congress’ sixteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry – the highest honor for a poet in this country. Her writing is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson because it illuminates the ordinary.As J.D. McClatchy states in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs…she is an anomaly in today’s literary culture – as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost.”

Her work has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, among other journals and anthologies. She was named to the “It List” by Entertainment Weekly, and one of her poems has been permanently installed at New York’s Central Park Zoo.

Along with the many projects and responsibilities that come with the title, she is also a powerful advocate for community colleges. Indeed, Ms. Ryan makes her living as a teacher, not with lofty creative poetical musings, but rather as a remedial reading professor at Marin County Community College, California, where she has resided since 1971.

Tuesday, April 6 • 7 p.m.
TCC Roper Performing Arts Center
Norfolk Campus

Taylor Mali, Performance Poetry

A former high-school teacher, Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement. He is also one of the few people in the world to have no other job than that of “poet.”

He is the author of two books of poetry, The Last Time As We Are and What Learning Leaves, and four CDs of spoken word. Formerly president of Poetry Slam Incorporated, today Mali makes his living entirely as a spoken-word artist. Mali is a vocal advocate for teachers and the nobility of the classroom, and has a goal of creating 1,000 new teachers through poetry, persuasion and perseverance.

Charles Wright

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright creates verse that is, according to Ted Genoways of The Southern Review, a "strange alchemy.” Wright's literary perseverance has resulted in what David Young described in Contemporary Poets as "one of the truly distinctive bodies of poetry created in the second half of the twentieth century." Wright has been widely published, winning the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1998 for Black Zodiac.

Through his numerous collections of poetry and particularly his "Appalachian Book of the Dead" sequence, Wright has consistently proved that he is, as fellow poet and academician Jay Parini asserts, "among the best poets” of his generation. Nevertheless, Wright remains modest about such achievements:  "One wants one's work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author."

In 1993, he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement. He is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist and educator. One of the most widely-read American poets, she prides herself on being "a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English." Always insisting on presenting the truth as she sees it, she has maintained a prominent place as a strong voice of the Black community.

Many of Giovanni's books have received honors and awards. Her autobiography, Gemini, was a finalist for the National Book Award; Love Poems, Blues: For All the Changes, and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea were all honored with NAACP Image Awards. Blues: For All the Changes reached #4 on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list, a rare achievement for a book of poems.

She has come to be called both a "National Treasure" and, most recently, one of Oprah Winfrey's twenty-five "Living Legends." The author of some 30 books for both adults and children, Nikki Giovanni is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.

For more information or if special accommodations are needed, please call 757-822-1122 or TTY 757-822-1248
two weeks prior to the event. Sign language is available upon request.

> back to the top