The 55th Writers’ Festival welcomes keynote author John Keene for a reading and discussion of his work. John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including Punks: New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021), which received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, a 2022 Thom Gunn Award, and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. His other works include Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), which received a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize in the UK, and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), with artist Christopher Stackhouse, and Annotations (New Directions, 1995). With Robert F. Reid-Pharr he co-edited Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems by Essex Hemphill (New Directions, 2025), and he translated Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer (Nightbook Books/A Bolha Editor, 2014), which was published in a new, revised edition from Pushkin Press in 2025. A 2018 MacArthur Fellow and a member of the African Poetry Book Fund, now based at Brown University, he is Distinguished Professor of English and Africana Studies, former Chair of Africana Studies, and former Interim Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers University-Newark.
As with all all other Writers' Festival programming, this event is free and all are welcome to attend.