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Terrance Hayes is the author of To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (Wave Books, 2018), American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, currently a finalist for the National Books Award for poetry, How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry, Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry, and three other award-winning poetry collections. His honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
(Photo credit: Kathy Ryan) -
Reviews
Hayes is a poet of swallowed garrulity, imagined riposte, mock correction, and interior litigation. We all have, in our heads, a marionette theatre where we stage what we might have done and should have said. There we are always the conquering puppet. Hayes's poems are like a Pixar version of the mental marionette show, a dazzling space crammed with comic jabs.
Dan Chiasson, New YorkerEven as these deft poems pass by, they ring. Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air. Hayes makes us alive to shimmer to doubleness, to vibration. He draws us in deeper to get crafted in his music, even as we fall further into it.
If asked whose formal innovations have most influenced a current generation of younger poets, the first name out of my mouth would be Terrance Hayes.
Tess Taylor, NPR Book Review
Kenyon Review
Reviews of books by Terrance Hayes
To Float in the Space Between
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Audio
Video
Interview with PBS Books at AWP 2017:
Reading "Barberism" for Poets.org:
The Life of a Poet, Discussion at the Library of Congress:
Reading at Politics & Prose:
Presenting Cave Canem with the 2016 Literarian Award from the National Book Awards:
