Hammer Museum

Monica Youn’s most recent volume is FROM FROM, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Among her many honors are the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. An associate professor of English at UC Irvine, she is a former constitutional lawyer, a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute, and a foremost interrogator of what Cathy Park Hong calls “the hidden biases built into the way we speak” and more specifically “the abjection of racial containment.” Organized and hosted by poet, literary critic, and UCLA...

Novelist Joan Silber has written nine books of fiction including Improvement (2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The New York Times calls her most recent novel, Secrets of Happiness (2021), “humane, elegant and wise.” Readings are followed by discussion with the author and UCLA professor Mona Simpson, who organizes this series. Copresented by the UCLA Department of English. Limited books will be available for purchase. Joan Silber is the author of nine books of fiction. The most recent is Secrets of Happiness (May 2021). Her novel, Improvement, won the National Book...

Poet Boris Dralyuk reads from his most recent volume, My Hollywood and Other Poems, a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of émigrés in Los Angeles. The Poetry Foundation proclaimed that “the ache of exile reverberates against the irretrievability of the past” in the Odessa-born poet’s work. Organized and hosted by poet, literary critic, and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Stephen Yenser. Cosponsored by UCLA English and UCLA Recreation. Limited books available for purchase.

Maureen McLane, poet, literary critic, and connoisseur of both the canon and the experimental tradition, epitomizes Wallace Steven’s dictum that “poetry is the scholar’s art.” Her six distinguished volumes of poems include World Enough, chosen Best Poetry Book of the Year by Paul Muldoon in The New Yorker, and her genre-breaking book of criticism and biography My Poets was lauded as “the survey course of my dreams” by Loren Stein. As Christine Smallwood described her manifold talent in Harper’s, McLane’s “mix of the humorous and the cerebral is at once exuberant and rinsed with melancholy.” Organized and hosted by poet,...

In Adam Moss’s new book The Work of Art, the former editor of New York magazine asks “What is the work of art?” Weaving conversations with some of the most accomplished artists of our time together with the journal entries, napkin doodles, and sketches that were their tools, Moss traces the tortuous paths and artist decisions that led to the making of transcendent novels, paintings, movies, songs, jokes, and more. Organized and hosted by author and UCLA professor Mona Simpson. Copresented by UCLA Department of English. Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine,...

Written over a decade while the author lived on four continents, award-winning poet V. Penelope Pelizzon’s latest collection, A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye, maps the cultural legacies we cherish against those we reject. Playful and wrenching by turns, with lines inflected by the spoken music of their Arabic, Oshiwambo, Xhosa, and Italian contexts, these profound poems explore a life where displacement is the norm. Organized and hosted by poet, literary critic, and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Stephen Yenser. Cosponsored by the UCLA Department of English and UCLA Recreation.