Lunch Poems, Berkeley’s storied noontime poetry series, will be held in person for the 2022-23 season in Morrison Library. The series is free and open to all audiences.
- All readings are from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m.
- Event contact: poems@library.berkeley.edu
- Map
- Past readings are posted to YouTube
Alex Dimitrov
Sept. 8
Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poetry — Love and Other Poems, Together and by Ourselves, and Begging for It — and the chapbook American Boys. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He has taught writing at Princeton, Columbia, and New York universities, among other institutions. Previously, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited the popular series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine.
Jake Skeets
Oct. 6
Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, American Book Award, and Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma.
This reading is presented in partnership with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley during their yearlong focus on indigeneity and reclamation. A conversation and craft talk on related themes will be at 4 p.m., Oct. 6, in the Maude Fife Room 315, in Wheeler Hall.
Safiya Sinclair
Nov. 3
Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Sinclair has been the recipient of numerous other honors, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Nation, Poetry, Kenyon Review, the Oxford American, and elsewhere. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.
Louise Glück
Feb. 2
Louise Glück is the author of two collections of essays and more than a dozen books of poems. Her many awards include the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2015 National Humanities Medal, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the 2014 National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the 2001 Bollingen Prize, the 2012 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962-2012, and the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at Yale University and Stanford University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
(Please note this reading will not be recorded.)
Claire Hong
March 2
Claire Hong is the author of Upend (Noemi Press), which was longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award. She received a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry from Stanford University (2019-21) and has creative writing degrees from the University of Arizona (M.F.A.) and Pratt Institute (B.F.A.). She was born in San Francisco and currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she works to distribute traditional, arid adapted seeds.
This reading is presented in partnership with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley during their yearlong focus on indigeneity and reclamation and as part of Berkeley’s A Year on Angel Island project. A conversation and craft talk on related themes will be at 4 p.m., March 2, in D23 Hearst Field Annex (ARC).
Ishion Hutchinson
April 6
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of three books of poetry, including the forthcoming The Mariner’s Progress, as well as a book of essays, Fugitive Tilts, also forthcoming. His awards include the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
If you require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact Interim Director Noah Warren, poems-library@berkeley.edu or 401-632-8032, with as much advance notice as possible, at least seven to 10 days before the event.
The Lunch Poems series, founded by Professor Robert Hass, is supported by Dr. and Mrs. Tom Colby, the UC Berkeley Library, the Morrison Library Fund, the Arts Research Center, the UC Berkeley English Department, the Dean’s Office of the College of Letters and Science, and Poets & Writers, Inc.
For more information or to be added to the Lunch Poems mailing list, please email poems@library.berkeley.edu, or follow us on Twitter.