Nightboat Books Through the Ages: A Twentieth-Anniversary Reading
Friday, March 28, 12:10–1:25 p.m. PT
Petree Hall C, Los Angeles Convention Center, Level 1
Over the last two decades, Nightboat Books has developed audiences for writers whose work resists convention and transcends boundaries, publishing more than two hundred books rich with poignancy, intelligence, and risk. To celebrate, a constellation of our authors—Dawn Lundy Martin, Brandon Som, Brian Teare, and Jackie Wang—together with our cofounder Kazim Ali, will read from their work as well as texts by other beloved Nightboat authors, from Etel Adnan and Fanny Howe to Assotto Saint and Lou Sullivan.
Panelist Bios:
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His many books encompass multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, essay, literary criticism, and cross-genre work. In 2004, he cofounded Nightboat Books, where he serves as president and founding editor. His latest books are Sukun: New and Selected Poems, the novel Indian Winter, and Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton. He is a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego.
Photo credit: Jesse Sutton
Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers; Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE; and A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she cofounded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She teaches at Bard College.
Photo credit: Shannon Greer
Brandon Som is a Chicano and Chinese American poet. His most recent poetry collection, Tripas, was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the author of The Tribute Horse, which won the 2015 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He lives in San Diego, on the traditional and unceded territory of the Kumeyaay Nation, and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of California San Diego.
Photo credit: Jason Bacasa
Brian Teare, a 2020 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of seven critically acclaimed books, most recently Doomstead Days—winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award (Longlist), the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a Lambda Literary Award—and Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the 2024 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. An associate professor of poetry at the University of Virginia, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Photo credit: Ryan Collerd
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she researches race, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021, National Book Award finalist), and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (2023).