Events This Semester

For Love: Celebrating Robert Creeley's Centenary

Thurs. & Fri., May 21st & 22nd

Thursday, May 21

Creeley Studies: Performances, Editions, Artist Books, Films

Burchfield Penney Art Center | SUNY Buffalo State | 1300 Elmwood Avenue

6:00pm    Panel

7:30pm    Reception

8:15pm     Film screenings, in collaboration with Black Rock Arts

Friday, May 22

Robert Creeley: Active Complement

UB Art Galleries | Center for the Arts Gallery

UB North Campus

11:00am     Gallery talk with Alexandra Gold (Harvard U)

Onward! A Centennial Celebration of Robert Creeley

UB Poetry Collection | 420 Capen Hall

UB North Campus

1:30pm     Exhibition talk with Stephen Fredman (U of Notre Dame, Emeritus)]

Creeley: Colleague, Collaborator, Teacher, Mentor, Poet

UB Anderson Gallery | 1 Martha Jackson Place

5:30pm     Roundtable

7:00pm     Reception

8:00pm     Community readings & reminiscences, in collaboration with Just Buffalo Literary Center 

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Robert Creeley Reading Group

Sun., April 12th & Sun., May 3rd

Get to know Creeley’s work!

Community Creeley Reading Group

UB Poetics Program & Just Buffalo Literary Center

Sunday, Apr 12, 1:30pm | Fitz Books, 1462 Main Street

Sunday, May 3, 1:30pm| Fitz Books 1462 Main Street

RSVP to receive a brief selection of Creeley texts:

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Book launch and reading with Mark Nowak, "AGAIN"

Fri., Apr. 17th | Fitz Books

5pm conversation, with refreshments

6pm reading

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

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

A seminar and reading with Aditi Machado

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

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

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