Poetry at Beinecke Library

Poetry collections, events, and news.

  • Women’s voices dominate the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prizes

    March 19, 2020

    Yale University today announced a female-dominated slate of recipients for the 2020 Windham-Campbell Prizes. The eight writers, including seven women, were honored for their literary achievement or promise and will receive $165,000 each to support their work. This year’s prize recipients are: in fiction, Yiyun Lee (United States/China) and Namwali Serpell (Zambia); in nonfiction, Maria Tumarkin (Australia) and Anne Boyer (United States); in poetry, Bhanu Kapil (United Kingdom/India) and Jonah Mixon-Webster (United States); and in drama, Julia Cho (United States) and Aleshea Harris (United States).

  • At Home With Elizabeth Bishop (Poets & Writers)

    February 12, 2020

    Image: Elizabeth Bishop seated on the back steps of the house near a sea grape tree, circa 1938. Credit: Louise Crane and Victoria Kent Papers, Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, Yale University

  • Never Too Late: Rachel Churner on the Late Style of Eileen Myles and Yvonne Rainer (Artforum, note: paywall)

    February 1, 2020

    LAST FALL, at the New School in New York, poet Eileen Myles presented an essay they’d written on the acquisition of their archives by Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Having sold 108 linear feet of personal notebooks, drafts, computer files, and trinkets—what the archivists dryly called “mixed materials”—and aware that all would soon be available to the grubby hands of the public, Myles noted, “It was a little like being buried alive.”

  • Rachel Blau DuPlessis Papers

    January 23, 2020

    The Beinecke Library is pleased to announce a newly acquired collection: the papers of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. DuPlessis is a contemporary American poet,...

  • David (Jhave) Johnston’s Machine Poetry (Yale Herald)

    October 28, 2019

    I'd never been to a reading in the Beinecke before, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that the four ambitiously long, semi-circular lines of chairs on the mezzanine were mostly full by the time I arrived at 4:55 p.m. Perhaps I walked into Jhave Johnston’s reading on Oct. 17 overly expecting to have the words to describe what I would see, knowing as I did that the reading/performance was part of the current Beinecke exhibition, Beyond Words: Experimental Poetry & the Avant-Garde