DETAILS AND HOW TO WATCH: This is an online rebroadcast of Danez Smith live event as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series. This online event will be accessible from the Inprint website. Details on how to access the reading will be provided to season subscribers. Those who purchase general admission tickets for this rebroadcast event will be provided the viewing link on their Eventbrite email receipt in the “Additional Information” section.
Danez Smith will read from their new collection Bluff, followed by an on-stage conversation with 2022-23 Texas Poet Laureate Lupe Mendez. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
“A Danez Smith poem,” according to Guernica, “doesn’t just bring imagery to life; it pulses on the page.” Smith is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Black Movie, Button Poetry Contest winner; and [insert] Boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Dan Chiasson wrote in The New Yorker of Don’t Call Us Dead, a finalist for the National Book Award, “These poems can’t make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. Smith’s work is about that imagination―its role in repairing and sustaining communities, and in making the world more bearable.” From 2017 to 2021, they were a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS.
Smith joins us to read from and talk about their new collection Bluff. Written during the summer of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt and when Minneapolis, Smith’s hometown, became the epicenter of protest after the murder of George Floyd, Bluff, Smith’s fifth collection, reckons with their responsibility as a Twin Cities poet in an era of violence, shame, and overwhelming pessimism. According to Book Riot, “From rage and grief to inspiration and hope, these poems are an emotionally powerful call to action.” Library Journal writes that Bluff is “sure to be one of the best collections of the year.”
Lupe Mendez is the 2022 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of Why I Am Like Tequila, winner of the 2019 John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. He is a cohost of the Ink Well podcast, presented by Tintero Projects and Inprint and the founder of Tintero Projects which works with emerging Latinx writers and other writers of color within the Texas Gulf Coast Region, with Houston as its hub. His work can be seen in the Gulf Coast Journal, the L.A. Review of Books, Poetry Magazine and Poem-A-Day from the Academy of American Poets.
