Monday 24th November 2025 – 6:30pm to 8pm

Judith E Wilson Studio, Faculty of English

9 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DP

 

Poets Dante Micheaux and Oluwaseun Olayiwola join Judith E Wilson Fellow Jay Bernard for a reading and discussion of Jay Wright’s collected poems, Transfigurations.

 

Jay Wright is one of the foremost living American poets.  In Transfigurations, the first UK publication of Wright’s work, his first eight books have been collected in a single volume, showing his vast range from quotidian American life to African cosmology. Harold Bloom described his work as “that commodious lyricism I associate with American poetry at its most celebratory.”  He has been the recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and The Bollingen Prize.

 

‘A profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer.’ Rebecca Tamás, Guardian

‘An astonishing New World epic…of human transfiguration and transformation, of nothing less than the great work of art that is ‘our life among ourselves’ Steven Meyer, Boston Review

‘The eight books that make up Transfigurations are contemporary classics. Together they form a rare monumental, sensuous force unlike anything else on either side of the Atlantic’ Ishion Hutchinson

 

 

Hosted by Judith E Wilson Fellowship & Penguin Classics

 

The drama studio is located in the basement of the Faculty of English and is accessible via the Faculty lift or a stairwell.

Please do not attend if experiencing cold-like symptoms.