Kaveh Akbar, Terrance Hayes, and Naomi Shihab Nye added to the Life in Quarantine Project(LiQ), Stanford University

I’m thrilled to share that the esteemed poets Kaveh Akbar and Terrance Hayes have agreed and have provided the submissions for the “Words in Quarantine” archive for the Liq Project by CESTA, Stanford university..I met them last year during my event at the New York Poetry Festival and they were headlining the festival. I explained the project to them and they agreed. I’m an ardent admirer of their work. After, Richard Blanco, US Presidential Inaugural Poet, is one of the more significant additions to the archive. Terrance Hayes is also the recipient of the McArthur Genius Fellow Grant. The archive now showcases almost 134+ authors from across the global literary community.

Kaveh Akbar:

https://liqproject.org/kaveh-akbar/

Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021), Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, September 2017), and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2017). Akbar’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, APR, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He founded and edits Divedapper, where he interviews major voices in contemporary poetry. Akbar has received a Pushcart and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2016, Akbar was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He was born in Tehran, Iran, and is currently a professor in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency program at Randolph College.

Terrance Hayes:

https://liqproject.org/terrance-hayes/

Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was the winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.  American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University. 

Naomi Shihab Nye

https://liqproject.org/naomi-shihab-nye/

Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the U.S. Her most recent books are The Turtle of Michigan, The Tiny Journalist, Everything Comes Next, Collected & New Poems, Cast Away, and Voices in the Air. She is on faculty at Texas State University and believes with all her heart that assault weapons should be banned from planet earth.

Happy Poetry!!

Megha Sood