In his third and most recent collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), Jericho Brown focuses his attention on the black queer body, bringing both terror ...

The Lewis Global Studies Center Global Encounters Photo contest provides a venue for Smith students to share their global experiences with the Smith community. All Smith students are encouraged to ...

The Department of English Language and Literature aims to teach all students to write and speak well and to read skillfully, thoughtfully and with pleasure. We offer many courses that stress literary ...

Nancy Morejón is the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba. Born in 1944 in Havana to a militant dock worker and a trade-unionist seamstress, Morejón graduated ...

Natalie Diaz’s poetry is raw, rhythmic, and tender. The New York Times called her debut, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), an “ambitious… beautiful book.” Pima and Mojave, and an enrolled member of ...

Jamaal May, described by the Boston Review as a “poet as machinist”, writes exquisite paths between the melancholy and the sublime. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, May explores themes of ...

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award which circles their Black, queer, and HIV positive status. At once haunted, sensual, explosive and ...

Meena Alexander has called herself a “woman cracked by multiple migrations.” Born in India, raised in Sudan, educated in England, and currently a resident of New York City, she has drawn on ...

Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf: A Choreo-Poem, with its spectrum of revelatory voices exploring a black woman’s experience, changed the face of ...

Jay Wright is the author of eight books of poems, including The Homecoming Singer (1971), Dimensions Of History (1976), Selected Poems (1987), and Boleros(1991). In 1996 the Chancellors of the Academy ...

Gwendolyn Brooks has been a leading force in American letters for decades. Her poetry, writes Adrienne Rich, “holds up a mirror to the American experience entire, its dreams, self-delusions and ...

Mark Strand’s poems are known for clarity and a deeply inward sense of language. He has been described as existential, playful, mysterious—a poet of simple words and sentences that add up to powerful ...