In this talk Douglas Kearney follows the genius work of Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton as they engage, via poetry, two murders that could have happened today, have happened before, and will likely happen again. Douglas Kearney is the author of eight books, including the poetry collections
Sho (Wave Books, 2021), a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner
and a National Book Award, Pen America, and Kingsley Tufts Award finalist, and
Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial
Poetry Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry. His most recent essay
collection, Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022), won the Poetry Foundation’s
Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism.