The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Fellowships Program and Program in Creative Writing presents Hodder Poets Represent Through the Decades, an evening of readings in celebration of more than eighty years of Hodder Poets at Princeton University. Award-winning poets Jacob Shores-Argüello, Mary Jo Bang, and Cynthia Cruz, all of whom are past recipients of the fellowship, will read from their work on October 7 from 4:30-6:30 p.m. in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus. The event, organized by current Princeton Arts Fellow, former Hodder Fellow, and award-winning poet Nicole Sealey, is free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing and reception. The Wallace Theater is fully accessible with an assistive listening system. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.

The Hodder Fellowship, a highly competitive artist fellowship program awarded by Princeton University, is annually given to artists and writers of exceptional promise to pursue independent projects during the academic year. Potential Hodder Fellows may be writers, composers, choreographers, performance artists, visual artists, writers, translators, or other kinds of artists or humanists from anywhere in the world who have “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts”; they are selected more “for promise than for performance.” The Hodder is designed to provide Fellows with the “studious leisure” to undertake significant new work.

Mary Jo Bang. Photo by Carly Ann Faye

Mary Jo Bang, who received the Hodder Fellowship in 1999-2000, 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 B.A and M.A. in sociology from Northwestern University, a B.A. in photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University. She is also the recipient of 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.

Photo courtesy 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 October 2025 from the University of Chicago Press and Twilight with Four Way Books in 2026. A Hodder Fellow at Princeton from 2010-11, Cruz is also the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cruz earned a B.A. in English literature at Mills College, an M.F.A. in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an M.F.A. in art writing at the School of Visual Arts, an M.A. in German language and literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and she has recently completed a Ph.D. 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 by Michael Lionstar

Nicole Sealey was a Hodder Fellow in 2019-20 at Princeton and is currently a 2024-26 Princeton Arts Fellow. 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. Sealey 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 other honors include 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. Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida.

Photo courtesy Jacob Shores-Argüello

A Hodder Fellow at Princeton from 2018-19, Jacob Shores-Argüello is a Costa Rican American poet and prose writer. He is the author of In The Absence of Clocks, which was awarded the 2011 Crab Orchard Series Open Competition judged by Yusef Komunyakaa. His second book, Paraíso, was selected for the inaugural CantoMundo Poetry Prize judged by Aracelis Girmay. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Academy of American Poets, among others. Shores-Argüello has also received the Dzanc Books ILP International Literature Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry. He is a current 2024-2025 Rome Prize winner in Literature.

Established in 1944 and first awarded to critic Richard P. Blackmur, the Hodder Fellowship was given to one writer each year through 1997. In 1998 the Fellowship grew to support two artists and was awarded that year to poet Sharona Ben-Tov and playwright Naomi Iizuka. Beginning in 2013, artists other than writers became eligible to apply for and receive the Hodder Fellowship. Five fellowships are currently awarded each year; 2025-26 Hodder Fellows include sculptor Carlos Agredano, performing and visual artist Satoshi Haga, novelist Ayana Mathis, composer Peter S. Shin, and playwright Catherine Yu. Past Fellows have included novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, painter Mario Moore, poet Natalie Diaz, choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, playwrights Lauren Yee and Martyna Majok, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), composer, and musician Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa.

Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about this event, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.