Peter Gizzi and John Yau In Conversation with Michael Dumanis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Join Michael Dumanis in a Q&A with visiting poets Peter Gizzi and John Yau.

Peter Gizzi is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023), Now It’s Dark (2020), and Archeophonics (2016), a finalist for the National Book Award, all from Wesleyan. In 2020 Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems in the UK. In 2024 Penguin UK published an expanded edition of Fierce Elegy. His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Guggenheim Foundation, and The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. Editing projects have included o•blēk: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and with the late Kevin Killian, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). From 2007 to 2012 he was the poetry editor for The Nation. Since 2003 he has been a contributing editor to the literary journal Conjunctions. He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

John Yau has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. His most recent books of poetry include Tell It Slant (Omnidawn, 2023), Bijoux in the Dark (Letter Machine Editions, 2018), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (Copper Canyon, 2012).  Born in Lynn, Massachusetts to Chinese emigrants, he is the founding editor of the small press Black Square Editions and Professor of Critical Studies at Rutgers Unviersity’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. His work has been honored with the Jackson Poetry Prize; fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and the Rabkin Prize for excellence in visual arts journalism. His books of art criticism include In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol and A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, as well as monographs on Wifredo Lam, Thomas Nozkowski, Joe Brainard, Catherine Murphy, A. R. Penck, Richard Artschwager, Pat Steir, Liu Xiaodong, and Kim Tschang-yeul.

John Yau photo credit: Jack Mitchell