Poetry Reading featuring Rae Armantrout and James Byrne
Sponsored by the Judith E Wilson Centre for Poetry & Poetics, University of Cambridge, and Blackbox Manifold poetry journal
When & where: Thurs 13th March 2025, 7:15pm – 8:30pm in the J. E. Wilson Drama Studio, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP.
Free and open to all! Contact for Enquiries: Alex Houen, email <ah217@cam.ac.uk>
Rae Armantrout is the author of 18 books of poetry. She began her career in association with the ‘Language Poetry’ movement in San Francisco. Her book Versed received the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Her most recent book is Go Figure (Wesleyan University Press, 2024). Writing for The Poetry Foundation, David Woo says that Armantrout’s work ‘emanates the radiant astonishment of living thought’. Her work has appeared in many anthologies including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry. She is Professor Emerita at The University of California and the current judge of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
James Byrne is a poet, editor, translator and visual artist living in London. His most recent poetry collection is The Overmind (2024, Broken Sleep Books). A Selected Poems, Nightsongs for Gaia, is due in 2025. In 2012, he cotranslated and co-edited Bones Will Crow, the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poetry to be published in English (Arc, 2012) and I am a Rohingya, the first book of Rohingya refugee poems in English. Byrne is the International Editor for Arc Publications and co-editor of Atlantic Drift: An Anthology of Poetry and Poetics (Edge Hill University Press/Arc, 2017). His co-translation with the author Ro Mehrooz of Rohingya poems, Poems Written Through Barbed-Wire Fences, was published by Arc in October 2024.
