Reading with Poet Peter Gizzi In-Person
Peter Gizzi is an award-winning poet and the author of ten books of poetry, as well as several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books.
This program is in-person only.
Influenced by Ezra Pound, the Beat Poets, and John Ashbery, Gizzi uses both narrative and lyrical gestures to engage and question distance and light in his search for the unmapped. Reflecting on the question of whether his work is narrative or lyric, Gizzi stated in an interview with Poetry Daily, “I think I am a narrative poet—I’m just narrating my bewilderment as a citizen.” In the same interview he spoke of his desire “to compose just at the boundaries of the known—to find a way to write at the edge of an already impacted history and world which is where we always already are at all times.”
Join us for a reading with Gizzi, who is a visiting Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway House with The Community Library. His visit is in partnership with the MFA Program at Boise State University. For two days in March, he will be leading workshops in Ketchum for BSU MFA students, in partnership with the Library.
His books include: Fierce Elegy (Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Wesleyan, 2023), Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan, 2020), Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK 2020), Archeophonics (Finalist for the National Book Award, Wesleyan, 2016); In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987-2011 (Wesleyan, 2014); Threshold Songs (Wesleyan, 2011); The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (Wesleyan, 2003); Artificial Heart (Burning Deck, 1998); and Periplum (Avec Books, 1992). His work has been translated into numerous languages and anthologized in the U.S. and abroad.
- Date:
- Thursday, March 12, 2026
- Time:
- 5:30pm - 6:30pm
- Time Zone:
- Mountain Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- John A. and Carole O. Moran Lecture Hall
- Campus:
- The Community Library
- Audience:
- Adults
- Categories:
- Lectures & Conversations
More about Peter Gizzi:
Peter Gizzi grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and was educated at New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gizzi’s honors include the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets as well as fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rex Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cambridge, and he has taught at Brown University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Program at Naropa, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts (1987-1993); The Exact Change Yearbook (Exact Change/Carcanet, 1995); The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 1998); and My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan, 2008). He served as Poetry Editor for The Nation (2007-2011). In 2018, Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi.