The 59th Wallace Stevens Poetry Program with Brenda Hillman 

Wednesday March 11, 2026 

reception 6 p.m./ reading 7 p.m. 

Konover Auditorium, UConn, Storrs 

Free and open to the public 

Award-winning poet Brenda Hillman is the author of numerous collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry; Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days; and her most recent In a Few Minutes Before Later. In 2016 she was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor. Among other awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  

Hillman’s visit is organized by the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program Committee in UConn’s Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Funding is provided by the Aetna Chair of Writing, the English Department Speaker’s Fund, the UConn Humanities Institute, and donations by English faculty and private individuals who gave generously through the 2024 UConn Gives Campaign. 

Wednesday March 27, 2024 /  Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center, 405 Babbidge Road, UConn Storrs Campus /  reception 6 pm,  reading 7 pm

Free and open to the public

MacArthur “Genius” and National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes will visit UConn on Wednesday March 27 as the 58^th Wallace Stevens Poet. One of the most compelling voices in American poetry, Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections, including American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and T.S, Eliot Prize; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.

Hayes’s visit is organized by the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program Committee in UConn’s Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Funding is provided by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, the UConn Humanities Institute, UConn’s African American Cultural Center, the English Department Speaker’s Fund, the Irish Studies Speaker’s Fund, and private individuals who donated generously through the 2023 UConn Gives Campaign.