When you think of the University of Michigan, do you think of poetry? You should, because U-M has been home to some of the great poets of the 20th century -- and now the 21st as well. Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, W.H. Auden, Jane Kenyon, and Frank O'Hara have all been affiliated with Michigan. This great tradition started in the 1920s, when Frost served as the University's first Fellow in Creative Arts. And it is a tradition continued by contemporary poets who studied at U-M and who are now at the center of conversations about American poetry -- individuals such as Victoria Chang, francine j. harris, and Jaswinder Bolina. Join us to learn from Cody Walker about U-M's rich history of poetic writing.

Cody Walker directs the University of Michigan English Department’s Undergraduate Program in Creative Writing. He also directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Northern Michigan. The author of three poetry collections, including The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser Press, 2016), his work appears in The Yale Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and two editions of The Best American Poetry series. His awards include the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah, the Howard Mosher Short Fiction Prize from Hunger Mountain, and residency fellowships from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Amy Clampitt Fund, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A longtime writer-in-residence in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, he was elected Seattle Poet Populist in 2007. In 2013 he coedited Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan Press). At the University of Michigan, he’s been a UMS-Mellon Fellow and a Michigan Roads Scholar. This summer he’ll be a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities.