Award-winning poets Yona Harvey & Gary Jackson will read from and discuss their work as part of the Working Writers Series sponsored by the Creative Writing Program.

Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, winner of The Believer Book Award in Poetry, and Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award.  Between the publication of her first two poetry books, Harvey co-wrote Marvel Comics’ World of Wakanda, which earned an Eisner Award for best limited series, and co-wrote the comic book series Black Panther & the Crew. Her third poetry collection is forthcoming in September 2026. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Best American Poetry, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing and A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry. She’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, the Heinz Foundation’s Carol Brown Award, and the inaugural Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from Saint Mary’s College of Maryland.

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections, small lives, (University of New Mexico Press, 2025) origin story (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), both part of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, and Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf, 2010), which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He’s also co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair, 2021). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Sun, Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, and Copper Nickel. He’s published work in several anthologies, including Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. He was featured in the 2013 New American Poetry Series by the Poetry Society of America, and received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Art Omi. He’s been a guest on the BBC News World Service: The Cultural Frontline, and given readings and craft talks for Carnegie Hall, Folger Theater, and various venues across the country. In 2023, he was selected to serve as part of the Cave Canem Cultural Preservation Project Team to record the oral histories of the first-year fellows and founders of Cave Canem.