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Mar 23

Experimental Plant Life: Poetry Reading featuring Desiree C. Bailey and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

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Held Lecture Hall, 304 Barnard Hall
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  • Add to Calendar 2023-03-23 18:00:00 2023-03-23 20:00:00 Experimental Plant Life: Poetry Reading featuring Desiree C. Bailey and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge Image left credit: right credit: Wilton Schereka, Kelly Writer's House staff The Barnard Creative Writing program presents two award-winning poets who utterly transform literary form to enact a more radical relationship with the life of plants. Yale Younger Poet Desiree C. Bailey’s poems rework the epic into an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation amidst the Haitian Revolution. A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge narrates an experimental relationship with flowers, birds, dolphins, stars, souls, and spacetime: “few living poets are as able to enter headlong into the spiritual state of our environment and its endangerment,” writes Major Jackson in the New York Times, calling Berssenbrugge “one of the best minds in modern poetry.” Reserve a seat on Eventbrite here.  Desiree C. Bailey is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. Her poetry collection What Noise Against the Cane, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, weaves together political resistance, Caribbean folklore, diaspora and the realities of Black life in America. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award and T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and named a Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University. As Yusef Komunyakaa writes, “Wherever this voice goes a Caribbean sun travels with it transfiguring what a maroon might overhear—a call awaiting response.” Born in Beijing, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses; Empathy; and I Love Artists. Her collection A Treatise on Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, PEN Open Book Award, and Kingsley Tufts Prize. Plant Thought, a chapbook in collaboration with Kiki Smith and RIchard Tuttle is forthcoming.  She was awarded the Mary McCarthy Award in recognition of engagement in the public sphere. In 2021, she won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry for her lifetime contributions to American Poetry. Held Lecture Hall, 304 Barnard Hall Barnard College barnard-admin@digitalpulp.com America/New_York public
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bio images of Desiree C Bailey and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
left credit: right credit: Wilton Schereka, Kelly Writer's House staff

The Barnard Creative Writing program presents two award-winning poets who utterly transform literary form to enact a more radical relationship with the life of plants. Yale Younger Poet Desiree C. Bailey’s poems rework the epic into an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation amidst the Haitian Revolution. A finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge narrates an experimental relationship with flowers, birds, dolphins, stars, souls, and spacetime: “few living poets are as able to enter headlong into the spiritual state of our environment and its endangerment,” writes Major Jackson in the New York Times, calling Berssenbrugge “one of the best minds in modern poetry.” Reserve a seat on Eventbrite here. 

Desiree C. Bailey is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, NY. Her poetry collection What Noise Against the Cane, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, weaves together political resistance, Caribbean folklore, diaspora and the realities of Black life in America. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award and T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and named a Best Books of 2021 by the New York Public Library. Desiree is the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University. As Yusef Komunyakaa writes, “Wherever this voice goes a Caribbean sun travels with it transfiguring what a maroon might overhear—a call awaiting response.”


Born in Beijing, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Hello, the Roses; Empathy; and I Love Artists. Her collection A Treatise on Stars was a finalist for the National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, PEN Open Book Award, and Kingsley Tufts Prize. Plant Thought, a chapbook in collaboration with Kiki Smith and RIchard Tuttle is forthcoming.  She was awarded the Mary McCarthy Award in recognition of engagement in the public sphere. In 2021, she won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry for her lifetime contributions to American Poetry.

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