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. This year, as part of the GVSU Arts Celebration, we are excited to have Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tyehimba Jess joining us for a poetry reading and conversation.

Tyehimba Jess

Poetry Reading & Conversation

Thursday, October 16, 2025
7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

Loosemore Auditorium
GVSU Pew Campus
401 Fulton St. West
Grand Rapids, Michigan

This event is free and open to the public.

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.

For more information about this event, email the GVSU College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at [email protected]

Recommended Reading

Selected Poems by Tyehimba Jess Online

• Poems by Tyehimba Jess at the Poetry Foundation
• Poems by Tyehimba Jess at Poets.org
• Poems from Olio by Tyehimba Jess at The Common
• "Hagar in the Wilderness" at The Slowdown

 

Works by Tyehimba Jess

Poetry

• Olio (Wave Books 2016)
  Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them. Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
   
• leadbelly: poems (Wave Books 2005)
  A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety of intimate perspectives and using a range of innovative poetic forms. A collage of song, culture, and circumstance, alive and speaking.

Audio

• Olio Live (Audible)
  In Olio Live - a very special one-night performance recorded live at the Minetta Lane Theater in February 2019—poet Tyehimba Jess introduces listeners to his 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Olio. A stellar cast of actors, accompanied by pianist Jeremy Gill, performs a selection of poems from the collection, all of which reinterpret the lived experience of real historical figures.
   

Selected Media about Tyehimba Jess

• Review of Olio by Tyehimba Jess at Tupelo Quarterly
  "Tyehimba Jess’s second book, Olio, is a book without rules, blues on the page. It weaves new and reimagined facts with poetry, prose, and biographies of first-generation freed slaves who performed in minstrel shows. A spellbinding and lyrical melange of verse, Olio resembles its namesake—a minstrel show’s hodgepodge variety act that later evolved into Vaudeville, “the heart of American show business.” In Olio, Jess examines the transition from plantation slavery to a less overt servitude where, marked as entertainers, overburdened black women and men mock themselves and their people for the audience’s merriment."
• Interview with Tyehimba Jess at Frontier Poetry
  Interview with Tyehimba Jess with Anne Rasmussen about Olio at Frontier Poetry. Jess says, "I was drawn to this era of performers out of a curiosity about the state of black artistic production before the age of recording. I was and still am curious about Black artists who were active from around the time of the Civil War until WW1. This was the first generation to pursue their crafts in a USA where chattel slavery had been outlawed – they were pioneers in personal freedom – the freedom to play any instrument they could get their hands on, to perform in an way that satisfied themselves alone as well as any audience they might seek."

Past Poetry Nights

2024: Paisley Rekdal

2023: Kimiko Hahn

2022/23: Juan Felipe Herrera

2021/22: Danez Smith, Marcel "Fable" Price, and Ericka "Kyd Kane" Thompson

2019: Ellen Bass and Kevin Young

2018: Carl Phillips and Ada Limón

2017: Jane Hirshfield and Dan Gerber

2016: Tracy K. Smith and Oliver de la Paz

2015: Kwame Dawes and Aimee Nezhukumatathil

2014: Mark Doty and Dorianne Laux

2013: Li-Young Lee and Pattiann Rogers

2012: Nikky Finney and B.H. Fairchild

2011: Ted Kooser and Terrance Hayes

2010: Carolyn Forché and Bob Hicok

2009: Tony Hoagland and Patricia Smith

2008: Paul Muldoon and Natasha Trethewey

2007: Gary Snyder and Stanley Plumly

2006: Sharon Olds and Sonia Sanchez

2005: C.K. Williams and Philip Levine

2004: Rita Dove and Charles Wright

2003: Jim Harrison, Galway Kinnell, and Dan Gerber

2002: Billy Collins, Robert Hass, and Naomi Shihab Nye

2000: Robert Pinsky

About Poetry Night and the GVSU Arts Celebration

Hosted by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Department of Writing, Poetry Night is part of the GVSU Arts Celebration, which provides free art events for our campus and local communities. These curated events explore and promote the written, visual, and performing arts. At Grand Valley State University, the arts are a vital part of our curriculum, providing experiential and high impact learning across the university. The GVSU Arts Celebration strives to provide free, impactful, art-related programming for the university and surrounding community. 

See the GVSU Arts Celebration webpage for more information about Arts Celebration programming.