Hodder Poets Represent Through the Decades celebrates 80+ years of the Hodder Fellowship with readings by award-winning poets who are past recipients of the Fellowship, a highly competitive artist fellowship program awarded by Princeton University. Poets include Mary Jo Bang (1999-2000), Cynthia Cruz (2010-2011), and Jacob Shores-Argüello (2018-2019), organized by current Princeton Arts Fellow, former Hodder Fellow (2019-2020), and award-winning poet Nicole Sealey.
Admission & Details
The reading is free and open to the public; no tickets required.
Directions
Get directions to the Wallace Theater, located on the Forum level of the Lewis Arts complex, 122 Nassau St., Princeton.
Accessibility
The Wallace Theater is an accessible venue with an assistive listening system. Visit our Venues and Studios section for accessibility information at our various locations. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at 609-258-5262 or email LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week in advance of the event date.
About the Poets
Mary Jo Bang. Photo credit: Carly Ann Faye
Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award; A Doll for Throwing; and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has published translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz. She is also the co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi. Bang has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She is the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Bang is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches creative writing.
Cynthia Cruz. Photo courtesy of the artist
Cynthia Cruz
Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight collections of poems, two collections of critical essays, and one novella. Two new collections of poems are forthcoming: Sweet Repetition in 2025 from the University of Chicago Press and Twilight with Four Way Books in 2026. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German Language and Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and has recently completed a PhD in philosophy at the European Graduate School, where her dissertation focused on Hegel and madness. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame.
Nicole Sealey. Photo credit: Michael Lionstar
Nicole Sealey
Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa. Her honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships from Princeton University, a Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Jacob Shores-Argüello. Photo courtesy of the artist
Jacob Shores-Argüello
Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet and prose writer. His second book, Paraíso, was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize judged by Aracelis Girmay. He was a 2018-19 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Lannan Literary Fellow for Poetry, and a 2024-2025 Rome Prize winner in Literature.
