D.A. Powell will read at UConn at 6 p.m. on Thursday March 31, 2022, via Zoom.

A second online reading will be held at the The Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts on April 5. 

The UConn event on March 31 is free and open to the public. You may register here:

Acclaimed poet D.A. Powell has been praised for both his gravity and his wit. As one critic wrote, “No accessible poet of his generation is half as original, and no poet as original is this accessible.” Powell’s early books Tea, (1998), Lunch (2000), and Cocktails (2004) are often read as a trilogy on the AIDS epidemic. Powell’s fourth book, Chronic (2009), won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest collection, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Fellow writer Carl Phillips describes Powell’s poems as “entirely of-the-moment while at every turn [announcing] … not merely an awareness, but an actual confidence with such prosodic traditions as the heroic couplet and the pentameter line, such cultural and literary traditions as those of the Old Testament and of meaningfully comic punning…. No fear, here, of heritage nor of music nor, refreshingly, of authority. Mr. Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human.” Powell has taught at Harvard University, Columbia University, and is currently a Professor at the University of San Francisco.

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