Undisciplining the Fields: Major Jackson, reading and in conversation with Tonya M. Foster

The Poetry Center and City Lights Books co-present renowned poet Major Jackson, reading from his recent book, Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems, and engaging in conversation with poet and scholar Tonya M. Foster. This event is the latest in Foster's series co-organized with The Poetry Center, Undisciplining the Fields, and takes place onsite at City Lights. The event will also be broadcast on zoom, details here. Please do join us. Please register online at Eventbrite for a free ticket.

Supported by the George and Judy Marcus Chair in Poetry, San Francisco State University.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023), The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. He also is host of The Slowdown, a poetry podcast. More at majorjackson.com

Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court (*belladonna, 2015) and is the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State. 

Undisciplining the Fields is a new conversation, reading (and sometimes performance) series that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of fields to discuss and share their cross-disciplinary practices and thinking. Initiated by Tonya M. Foster, in collaboration with The Poetry Center, the series is envisioned as an unruly exploration of the ways that practice is developed and encouraged through interest, study, and accident; and of the ways that creativity motivates / instigates investigations of the possible.