April 25, 2025
Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as an “encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant” writer, Tyehimba Jess is Andover’s 2025 Isham Fellow in Poetry.
Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”
A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Jess is a Distinguished Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.
Free and open to the public.
This event is sponsored by the Alumni/ae Lectureship Fund, the Lana Lobell Fund, and the Sandra Isham Vreeland Fund, dedicated to a PA graduate who was an aspiring poet.
Kemper AuditoriumA Reading by Award-Winning Poet Tyehimba Jess
7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m., Kemper AuditoriumHailed by Publisher’s Weekly as an “encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant” writer, Tyehimba Jess is Andover’s 2025 Isham Fellow in Poetry.
Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”
A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Jess is a Distinguished Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.
Free and open to the public.
This event is sponsored by the Alumni/ae Lectureship Fund, the Lana Lobell Fund, and the Sandra Isham Vreeland Fund, dedicated to a PA graduate who was an aspiring poet.