Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Our second season, “Online Poetry: The Refuge of Witnessing” will provide a weekly poetry sanctuary to hear moving words, deepen our exploration of their meaning, and connect with each other. Join us each Thursday from 12:00 to 1:00 pm. It will be your port in a worldly storm.

This week’s poet will feature Malachi Black, author of Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a Lannan Literary Selection, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and a selection for the Poetry Society of America’s New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kamnisky). Black is also the author of two limited-edition chapbooks: Quarantine (Argos Books, 2012) and Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). His poems appear or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God (Yale UP, 2013); Discoveries: New Writing from The Iowa Review (Iowa Review, 2012); and The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing [U.K.], 2016).

Black was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Morris County, New Jersey. He holds a B.A. from New York University, an M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin‘s Michener Center for Writers, and a Ph.D. in English with a Creative Writing emphasis from the University of Utah. A 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, Black has also received fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo. Black was the subject of an Emerging Poet profile by Mark Jarman in American Poets: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, and his work has several times been set to music and has been featured in exhibitions both in the U.S. and abroad, including recent and forthcoming translations into French, Dutch, Croatian, and Lithuanian. Black is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego and lives in California.