A poetry reading by National Book Award-winning poet and Princeton alumnus Nathaniel Mackey, Class of 1969, will be presented by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing and Department of English at Princeton University. The reading begins at 7:00 p.m. on November 18 at the Hearst Dance Theater at the Lewis Arts complex, 122 Alexander Street, on the Princeton campus. The event is free and open to the public; tickets are available through University Ticketing. The Dance Theater is an accessible venue with an assistive listening system available. 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.
Nathaniel Mackey. Photo credit: Cybele Knowles
Mackey is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and editor. He is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently By Bent Light (The Bodily Press, 2025) and Double Trio (New Directions, 2021), and a boxed set of three books: Tej Bet, So’s Notice and Nerve Church. He is also the author of a multi-volume fiction work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fifth and final volume is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017), and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017).
His honors include the National Book Award for Poetry (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024).
Mackey has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he is currently the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke University.
Born in Miami, Florida, in 1947 and a Californian most of his life, he has been a resident of Durham, North Carolina, since 2010. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975.
The reading is supported by the Department of English’s Bain-Swiggett Fund.
Other readings coming up at Princeton, all of which are free and open to the public, include Didi Jackson and Major Jackson on February 17 and Kaitlyn Greenidge and Hisham Matar on March 24 as part of the Althea Ward Clark W’21 Reading Series; and Hala Alyan on February 10 and alumnus Jordan Salama, Class of 2019, on February 24, both along with seniors in the Program in Creative Writing as part of the C.K. William Reading Series. In addition, readings by students in the Creative Writing Program will be held on November 18 at 4:30 p.m. and April 14, and seniors will read from their independent work in April.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing, 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.
