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Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays to libretti. His most recent book is a collection of talks he presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series titled Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022). His most recent poetry collection, Sho (Wave Books, 2021), is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner, and a National Book Award, Pen America, Hurston/Wright, Kingsley Tufts, and Big Other Book Award finalist. He is the 2021 recipient of OPERA America’s Campbell Opera Librettist Prize, created and generously funded by librettist/lyricist Mark Campbell. Kearney is a 2022 McKnight Writing Fellow. A Whiting Writer’s and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others, he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.
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Reviews
"Reading Kearney’s poems is like being inside of a crystal — depending on the time of day and how the light is shining through the crystal, the poem’s meaning can change."
LA Review of Books, review-in-dialogue with Dean Rader and Victoria Chang
"A charismatic creator of performance and print, Kearney is a contradictory artist: He writes from the vernacular and hip hop, slang, sprung rhythms and song riffs, but also mutates English into an intellectually dense, artificial language no one could ever speak."
Ken Chen, NPR Review of Books -
Poems
- “Buck,” “Promissorry Note,” “Borax*” “Static,” “Fire” (in Boundary2)
- "Manesology" (in LARB)
-"The Drifters After School" (in The New Republic)
-"Just Wanna Be Like" (in PEN America)
-"...Fox!" and "Sho" (in Poetry)
-"Everyday [I Gets]" and "Black Flight" (in Sewanee Review
-"Welter" (in Virginia Quarterly Review) -
Audio/Visual
Audio
Visual
Douglas Kearney reads for the Museum of Contemporary Art
Douglas Kearney reads "Sho" as part of the Poetry Center’s Tenth Muse evening at the 92nd Street Y
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Articles
Interviews and Discussions
