Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Distinguished Professor of English at College of Staten Island.  

Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Poetry Night with Tyehimba Jess

Thursday, October 16, 2025, 7:00 - 8:30 pm, free
A book signing will follow the presentation
Loosemore Auditorium, DeVos Center, Pew (City) Campus

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” A Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018, and is a Distinguished Professor of English at College of Staten Island.  

Tyehimba Jess’s poems operate in many modes from biography to lyric, from traditional structures to innovative forms of his own invention. His first book, Leadbelly, explores the life of the legendary blues musician Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter through a combination of personal and historical perspectives. His second book, Olio, is made of poems half-rooted in fact and half-rooted in fiction as it presents the lives of African American vaudeville performers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a daring, courageous book that weaves together sonnets and songs and dramatic accounts to investigate and reimagine the lives of African American performers and the transition from plantation slavery to entertainers, all the while resisting the forces that sought to minstrelize them.

Occurring annually on or around the GVSU Pew Campus in Grand Rapids, GVSU Poetry Night has a tradition of bringing some of the most celebrated and distinguished poets to enlighten and entertain. One of the largest poetry reading series in the state thanks to the generosity of donors and the university, Poetry Night events are always free and open to the public.