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.
This series is linked to the course “Feminism & American Poetry,” taught this spring by Elisabeth Frost at Fordham University.
Kay Ulanday Barrett
Wednesday February 25, 11:30am ET - 12:30pm ET
Barrett is a poet, performer, cultural strategist, and A+ napper. They are a 2024 Disabled Futures Fellow (awarded by United States Artists, the Ford Foundation, and the 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 recipient of a James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell, and the recipient of residencies in 2023 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 was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.
Adedayo Agarau
Wednesday March 25, 11:30am - 12:30pm ET
Adedayo Agarau is a Nigerian poet, editor, and educator. His 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. Among his chapbooks are Origin of Name (African Poetry Book Fund, 2020) and The Arrival of Rain (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2020). Agarau is fluent in English, Pidgin, and Yoruba. His work explores themes of migration, cultural memory, and postcolonial identity.
Marcella Durand
Wednesday April 15, 11:30am - 12:30pm ET
Marcella Durand is a poet, essayist, and translator whose work explores intersections among ecology, science, art, and poetry. Durand's latest book, A Winter Triangle, winner of the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize (selected by Srikanth Reddy), was published in Fall 2025 by Fordham University Press. Her other books include Area (Belladonna, 2008); Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem Books, 2008); 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. With Jennifer Firestone, Durand edited Other Influences, an anthology of original essays by avant-garde feminist poets on their influences. She lives in New York City.
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