Poetry Reading: Robin Coste Lewis

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Robin Coste Lewis is the poet laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. In 2015 she published her poetry debut, Voyage of the Sable Venus. It was widely praised by critics and honored with the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry–the first poetry debut to do so since 1975. Lewis is a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. A finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, she has published her work in various journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, and Lambda Literary Review, among others. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.