Please celebrate National Poetry Month with the Yale Graduate Poets Reading Series on Monday, April 22, at 4:30pm in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, Room 317, with four marvelously talented poets: Meghan O’Rourke, incoming editor of The Yale Review and author of three collections of poetry, most recently Sun in Days (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017), and the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011), and Ben Purkert, author of For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018) will be the featured readers; African American Studies and English Ph.D. student Jessica Marion Modi and Comparative Literature Ph.D. candidate Ayten Tartici will serve as graduate student openers.
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the collections Sun in Days, Halflife, and Once, as well as a memoir, The Long Goodbye. A former editor at The New Yorker, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate, poetry editor for the Paris Review, and is currently the editor of The Yale Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Poetry, the New Republic, and Poetry, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, and other awards, she lives in Brooklyn.
Ben Purkert is the author of For the Love of Endings (Four Way Books, 2018). His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A contributing editor at Guernica, he is the founder of Back Draft, an interview series focused on poets and revision. He currently teaches at Rutgers.
Jessica Marion Modi is a PhD student in English and African American Studies at Yale University. Before beginning her PhD, she earned an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. Her work is published or forthcoming in the LARB, ARCADE, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere.
Ayten Tartici is a writer and PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University, where she was awarded the Gordon Barber Memorial Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Summerset Review, Confrontation Magazine, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. Her essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Slate and The Yale Review, among other publications. She previously completed her undergraduate studies at Harvard, where she was twice the recipient of the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for poetry. Raised in Istanbul, she lives in New York City.