Quinnipiac University to Host Acclaimed Poet John Murillo on Oct. 26

HAMDEN – Quinnipiac University will host a poetry reading and questions and answer session with acclaimed poet John Murillo at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 26 in the Carl Hansen Student Center, Room 119, on the Mount Carmel Campus.

“John Murillo is one of the leading voices in contemporary American poetry today, a peerless craftsman who writes with great personal intensity about social and political problems faced by Black and Latinx communities,” said Jason Koo, associate teaching professor of English at Quinnipiac. “He is the winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his second collection of poems, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, one of the biggest poetry prizes in the world.”

The event, which is free and open to the public, is part of QU’s Creative Writing Series.

Murillo is the author of the poetry collections “Up Jump the Boogie,” a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award; and “Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry,” winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award.

His many honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Recently, his poems have appeared in “American Poetry Review,” “Poetry,” and “Best American Poetry” anthology collections in 2017, 2019, and 2020. He is an associate professor of English at Wesleyan University.

“As poet Carolyn Forché writes, ‘Murillo is a poet for his time, equal to its urgency, and graced are we to have him among us in this time of need,’” Koo added.