Weaving imagination with life experience, poet Terrance Hayes shared his work as this fall’s Bingham Visiting Writer. His expressive—sometimes playful, sometimes raw—poems broached love, family, race, relationships, masculinity and music. Mr. Hayes began with several poems from Lighthead, for which he won a National Book Award in 2010. Mr. Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina. He earned his B.A. from Coker College and his M.F.A. from the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a member of the English department faculty. How to Be Drawn, his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award; it received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
“Poetry isn’t 2 + 2 = 4; it’s more zebra + alligator = Cadillac. And the reader might think, ‘That’s interesting. I’m engaged, and I’m looking closer. I might not understand it, but I can still feel my way through it.’ That’s the way language works, and that’s what drives the construction of my poetry.”