Paterson Poetry Prize Reading and Workshops with Joshua Bennett and Tom Sleigh April 6

Saturday April 6 will be the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize Winners reading with Joshua Bennett & Tom Sleigh. The reading is free and open to the public and begins at 1 pm at the Poetry Center at PCCC in Paterson, NJ. The poets will lead poetry workshops that morning. Registration is required for either workshop.

Information on the workshops.
Information on the reading and location.

Joshua Bennett of Braintree, MA, and Tom Sleigh of Brooklyn, NY, won the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize. Bennett won for The Study of Human Life (Penguin Books, New York, NY), and Sleigh won for The King’s Touch: Poems (Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN). 

Joshua Bennett

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.  Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Alongside his friend and colleague, Jesse McCarthy, he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the black expressive tradition. He lives in Massachusetts with his family. 

 Tom Sleigh  (Photo: Annette Hornischer)

Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry including the winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize, The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press, 2018), Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011). His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press, 2018) recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA grant recipient, and winner of numerous awards including the Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, John Updike Award, and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, The Common, and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.