Poetry Presenters
Watch this space as additional presenters will be confirmed during the next days and weeks.
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water.
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The Man in 119, the latest collection from accomplished poet Kazim Ali, explores loss and absence alongside the human body and the natural world. Here, the tongue becomes a collaboration between human and glacial current—the self, a “tectonic topography of god.” Grappling with questions of mortality in the wake of his mother’s passing, Ali asks where we go when we leave this world: “earth or sky or memory only.” With musicality, these poems build a space for contemplation, offering vignettes of various individuals, memories, and geographies. We learn that in migration, the body moves, reproduces itself through the experience of losing and living still.
Scott Beal
Scott Beal is the author of Stegosaurus Moon (Dzanc Books, 2026) and Wait 'Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014), as well as the chapbook The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in journals such as Rattle, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and have received awards including a Pushcart Prize. He directs the Lloyd Scholars for Writing and the Arts at the University of Michigan and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing. He co-hosts the Skazat! online poetry series and co-edits the literary journal Public School Poetry.
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Stegosaurus Moon explores heartbreak, divorce, parenthood and the discovery of new, often unexpected, ways forward. Poem by poem, the speakers puzzle through how one love comes apart and how a new life comes together in its wake.
Through encounters with everything from dinosaurs and scorpionflies, Britney Spears and the Rock, birthdays, deaths, pets, teenagers, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Rupaul’s Drag Race, the sequence builds into an examination of how the language of queer identity can be weaponized or can open space for more expansive ways to live and love. A tender accounting of the poet peering into a mirror that morphs and warps with language that consistently astounds, these pieces walk in step with the work of Ross Gay, Jeffrey McDaniel, Denise Duhamel, and Jennifer L. Knox.
Shara McCallum
Shara McCallum is the author of seven books, published in the US & UK, including Behold (2026); No Ruined Stone, winner of the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry; and Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry. From Jamaica and of Jamaican and Venezuelan parentage, she is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University and a 2026-27 Cheney Creative Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK.
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Behold is a fierce, searching collection that asks what it means to look closely — at art, at history, at the afterlives of migration. Moving between Jamaica and museums around the world, Shara McCallum gathers the voices and silences that shape our seeing: the labourers erased from the archive, the children left behind, the quiet watchers in the gallery.
With precision and emotional charge, these poems reveal the beauty in every act of witnessing. Behold is a bold call to attention, a refusal of the shallow glance, and a powerful reminder of what becomes visible when we truly look.