Advancing American Poetry & Poetics

We are a community of poets, scholars, students, and social justice workers who explore the power of poetry
to change the world for the better through acts of imagination and the energy of new languages and visions.

PJI Spring 2026 Event Series

The Poetic Justice Institute is excited to host three online poetry events this spring with Kay Ulanday Barrett, Adedayo Agarau, and Marcella Durand.

The Zoom series is linked to Elisabeth Frost's “Feminism & American Poetry” course she is teaching at Fordham University this spring. Details below!

Kay Ulanday Barrett

Wednesday February 25, 11:30am ET - 12:30pm ET

Barrett is a poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are a 2024 Disabled Futures Fellow by United States Artists, Ford Foundation, and Mellon Foundation, the winner of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry, a winner of the 2022 Next Book Residency with Tin House, a James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell, and most recently in 2023, residencies at Baldwin for the Arts and Millay Arts awarded by Lambda Literary. Their second book, More Than Organs (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020) received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

Adedayo Agarau

Wednesday March 25, 11:30am - 12:30pm ET

Adedayo Agarau’s debut collection, The Years of Blood, won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize for BIPOC Writers (Fordham University Press, Fall 2025). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow ‘25, a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Agbowó Magazine: A Journal of African Literature and Art and a Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. He is the author of the chapbooks Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020).

Marcella Durand

Wednesday April 15, 11:30am - 12:30pm ET

Marcella Durand latest book, A Winter Triangle, the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize recipient, was published in Fall 2025 by Fordham University Press. Durand is also the author of Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017) and Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.) (joca seria, 2016), with French translations by Olivier Brossard. Her other books include Area (Belladonna, 2008) and Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem Books, 2008). She lives in New York City.