Poetry Reading Series

Co-sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning, College of General Studies, and the BU Center for the Humanities (BUCH), the Poetry Reading Series strives to make poetry a fundamental part of university and community life. By presenting the work of both renowned and emerging poets, the series attempts to broaden our vision of poetry’s concerns and effects. In the past, the series has featured readings by Jorie Graham, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Geoffrey Hill, Vona Groarke, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Marilyn Hacker, David Ferry, and Linda Gregg, among others.

All readings are free and open to the public. Details on upcoming poetry reading series events will be added to this page and to the CGS calendar. Please direct any questions to Meg Tyler, mtyler@bu.edu, 617-358-4199.

2026 Events

SANDRA LIM and ROSANNA WARREN

Thursday, February 26th at 6 p.m., Katzenberg Center, 3rd floor, CGS, 871 Comm. Ave.

Rosanna Warren’s book of poems Hindsight appeared in September 2025, from W. W. Norton. She is a professor emerita from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, came out in 2008 and other books of poems include Departure (2003) , Ghost in a Red Hat (2011), and So Forth (2020). In 1995, Oxford University Press published the verse translation of Euripides’ The Suppliant Women she composed with Stephen Scully, and her anthology of essays on translation, The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field, appeared in 1989. She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2005, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

Sandra Lim was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in California. She earned a BA from Stanford University, a PhD from the University of California Berkeley, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lim is the author of the poetry collections Loveliest Grotesque (2006), which won a Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry, and The Wilderness (2014), winner of a Barnard Women Poets Prize. Of her poetry’s sometimes oblique relationship to “more legible markers or narratives of … racial and ethnic background,” Lim has said, “poetry always alerts me to the solitariness of individual consciousness, to the mystery of other people with other subjectivities, and to the conditions and dilemmas of moving through private and public forms of life. Perhaps being a writer of Asian descent makes negotiating those public forms more vivid, to be sure. A challenge for every writer, I imagine, is to understand that real exploration involves real risk; it can be scary and exhilarating even to discover unexpected aspects of one’s own sensibility in writing a poem.” Lim teaches in the BU Creative Writing Program.

Free and open to the public.
Co-sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities and CITL at CGS.

JOHN KINSELLA

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED

John Kinsella is the author of more than seventy books of poetry, fiction, criticism, plays, edited works (such as The Penguin Book of Australian Poetry), and collaborative works. The three volumes of his Australian collected poems are The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023), and Spirals (UWAP, 2024). Other poetry books include Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems (Picador, 2016), The Pastoraclasm (Salt, 2023), The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems (Norton, 2025), Ghost of Myself (UQP, 2025), and Aporia (Turtle Point Press, 2025). Recent critical books are Polysituatedness (Manchester University Press, 2017), Beyond Ambiguity: Tracing Sites of Literary Activism (MUP, 2021), and Legibility: An Antifascist Poetics (Palgrave, 2022). A frequent collaborator with other poets, writers, artists, musicians, and activists, Kinsella lives on stolen Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian wheatbelt. In 2007, he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and was awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry for Jam Tree Gully (Norton, 2012). He is a vegan anarchist pacifist of four decades and a committed environmental, anti-colonial, human, and animal rights activist.

Free and Open to the Public.
Co-sponsored by CITL at CGS and the BU Center for the Humanities.