Jericho Brown and Raena Shirali - Distinguished Poets Reading December 7

The Distinguished Poets Series readings are held on Saturdays at 1 pm at the Poetry Center, 32 Church Street, Paterson, New Jersey. All readings are free and open to the public. Open readings follow the featured readers when time allows.

The December reading will feature Jericho Brown and Raena Shirali.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019). His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Raena Shirali is the author of GILT (YesYes Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a 2019 PEN America Writer’s Emergency Fund Grant, a 2018 VIDA scholarship, a 2017 Philip Roth Residency at Bucknell University, and a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize in 2013. Her poems have also received prizes from Cosmonauts Avenue in 2016 and Gulf Coast in 2014. Shirali’s poems & reviews have appeared widely in American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, The Nation, The Rumpus, & elsewhere. She lives & teaches in Philadelphia, where she recently co-organized We (Too) Are Philly, a summer poetry festival highlighting voices of color. She also serves as Director of Pedagogy & Community Relations for Blue Stoop, a local literary hub, and is a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine.


The Distinguished Poets Series takes a break in January and February and returns February 1, 2020 with a reading with the Allen Ginsberg Awards Winners & 40th Anniversary of the Poetry Center.