Events This Semester

Info & RSVP for For Love: A Centenary Symposium for Robert Creeley
Receive readings & RSVP for Community Creeley Reading Group [scroll down]

Book launch and reading with Mark Nowak, ...AGAIN

Fri., Apr. 17th | Fitz Books 14612 Main Street

5:15pm conversation, with refreshments

6pm reading

Flyer with information on Nowak event, with author photo and cover photo of his book ...Again. Author bio: Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN, all from Coffee House Press. He wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press). Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School (https://www.instagram.com/workerwritersschool/).

A reading with Rainer Diana Hamilton, in conversation with Bianca Messinger

Thurs., Apr. 9th, 7:30pm | Just Buffalo Literary Center 

Zoom image: Flyer for reading intcluding author photo and book cover. Reading will be held at Just Buffalo on Thursday, April 9, at 7:30pm.                                                                                                 Flyer for reading intcluding author photo and book cover. Reading will be held at Just Buffalo on Thursday, April 9, at 7:30pm.                                                                                                .

A seminar and reading with Aditi Machado

Fri., Mar. 27th, 3pm | Poetics library, 410 Clemens

Fri., Mar. 27th, 7:30pm | Fitz Books

Zoom image: Please join us for a reading with Aditi Machado. Friday March 27th at 7:30pm at Fitz Books on 1462 Main St. Pictures of book covers: Material Witness by Aditi Machado and In the Realm of Motes by Baptiste Gaillard translated by Machado. Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her publications include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020), and Some Beheadings (2017); two book-length translations from the French, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof, 2025) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016); and several chapbooks. She is also a contributor to Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s collaborative mistranslation book project Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande, 2025). Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals like BOMB, Chicago Review, Fence, jubilat, Lana Turner, Volt, and Western Humanities Review. A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati. Please join us for a reading with Aditi Machado. Friday March 27th at 7:30pm at Fitz Books on 1462 Main St. Pictures of book covers: Material Witness by Aditi Machado and In the Realm of Motes by Baptiste Gaillard translated by Machado. Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her publications include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020), and Some Beheadings (2017); two book-length translations from the French, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof, 2025) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016); and several chapbooks. She is also a contributor to Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s collaborative mistranslation book project Ancient Algorithms (Sarabande, 2025). Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals like BOMB, Chicago Review, Fence, jubilat, Lana Turner, Volt, and Western Humanities Review. A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

Poetics talk with Joanna Mąkowska on contemporary American documentary poetics & translation

Thurs., Mar. 12th, 3pm | 420 Capen Hall

Zoom image: Green and white poster for Joanna Makowska's talk "beyond felt facts: documentary assemblages, nomadic translation, and global crises" featuring a headshot of Makowska and her bio. The talk description reads as follows: Moving between the interrelated practices of poetry translation and poetics research, Makowska’s talk will first take up her translations into Polish of Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and then discuss her current book project on documentary assemblages as a form of protest and resistance. Tracing the documentary impulse from the 1930s (Boyle, Rukeyser, Loy) to contemporary anti-war archival poetics in global context (Ammiel Alcalay and Ida Börjel), Makowska will also discuss how theories of montage, assemblage, and new materialism documentary literature’s polyvocal and processual nature. Green and white poster for Joanna Makowska's talk "beyond felt facts: documentary assemblages, nomadic translation, and global crises" featuring a headshot of Makowska and her bio. The talk description reads as follows: Moving between the interrelated practices of poetry translation and poetics research, Makowska’s talk will first take up her translations into Polish of Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and then discuss her current book project on documentary assemblages as a form of protest and resistance. Tracing the documentary impulse from the 1930s (Boyle, Rukeyser, Loy) to contemporary anti-war archival poetics in global context (Ammiel Alcalay and Ida Börjel), Makowska will also discuss how theories of montage, assemblage, and new materialism documentary literature’s polyvocal and processual nature.

Book launch and talk with Amy De’Ath, Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction

Thurs., Feb. 19th, 3pm | 420 Capen Hall 

Reception to follow

Zoom image: Poster for Amy De'Ath talk on Behind out Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford UP, 2026). The even is Thursday February 19th and 3:00pm at the UB Poetry Collection at 420 Capen. The talk description read as follows. In her first book, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of feminist literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil and others, Behind Our Backs explains how capital’s gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing. The poster indicates that a reception will follow the event. Amy De'Ath's bio is also included. Amy De’Ath is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford UP, 2026) and Not a Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024). She is also the editor of “Total Sexual Difference,” a dossier forthcoming from Mediations journal in Spring 2026. She lives in Boston, on the unceded territories of the Massachusee and the Mashpee Wôpanâak First Peoples. Poster for Amy De'Ath talk on Behind out Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford UP, 2026). The even is Thursday February 19th and 3:00pm at the UB Poetry Collection at 420 Capen. The talk description read as follows. In her first book, Amy De'Ath develops a new type of feminist literary criticism attuned to the way our lives are shaped by capital's impersonal compulsions – by what happens "behind our backs." Close reading works by Kay Gabriel, Bernadette Mayer, Bhanu Kapil and others, Behind Our Backs explains how capital’s gendering inversions are felt and critiqued in the poetic experiments of trans, queer, Indigenous, and diasporic writing. The poster indicates that a reception will follow the event. Amy De'Ath's bio is also included. Amy De’Ath is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction (Stanford UP, 2026) and Not a Force of Nature (Futurepoem, 2024). She is also the editor of “Total Sexual Difference,” a dossier forthcoming from Mediations journal in Spring 2026. She lives in Boston, on the unceded territories of the Massachusee and the Mashpee Wôpanâak First Peoples.

An Afternoon with Poet and Scholar John Wilkinson

The UB Department of English & the Poetics Program

invite you to an afternoon with poet & scholar

John Wilkinson

Vehement Lyric: Readings from Wood Circle and Fugue State

Wednesday, April 24th, 3pm

Poetics Program Library, 410 Clemens

Zoom image: John Wilkinson and book covers John Wilkinson and book covers.

Latasha N. Nevada Diggs

Thurs., Feb. 15,  3:30pm

Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall 

Trans Longevity: A Poetry & Poetics Symposium

Thursday, March 28, 7:30pm  | 403 Hayes Hall,  South Campus  

Trish Salah keynote lecture, reception to follow

Friday, March 29, 3:00pm | Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall 

Kay Gabriel, CAConrad, & Taylor Johnson panel & discussion, reception to follow

Friday, March 29, 7:30pm ||  Just Buffalo, 468 Washington St., 2nd Floor

Group poetry reading featuring symposium guests, and members of the Poetics and Just Buffalo community

The concept of “trans longevity” engages with all that enables more-than-survival for trans people today.  While attending to the precariousness of trans lives, trans longevity resists death-organized (cis) narratives and institutional configurations of transness – and is informed instead by trans archives that emphatically assert trans presence and by trans histories that offer templates for continuation through and beyond our present.  If trans futurity seems to require a leap to better times ahead, trans longevity proposes trans-futures in more tangible, scalable terms, supplying lived links embedded in today and its enduring pasts to a renovated collective long-haul.  


Our symposium seeks to explore trans longevity specifically as it is figured forth in a multitude of trans poetries and poetics that make more visible and available small and large modes of resistance to forces that damage the quality of present-tense trans life; that model trans joy, care, and indestructibility; and that channel the past’s material evidence to ensure our trans kin remain here, with, and now – for a long time to come.

Brenda Iijima & Janice Lee

Tuesday, April 2, 7:30pm

Just Buffalo, 468 Washington St., 2nd Floor

Asiya Wadud

Thursday, May 2, 3:30 pm  

Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall