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The Poets Are Coming, The Poets Are Coming

March 31, 2024 by Mark West
Categories: Storied Charlotte

Given that April is National Poetry Month, I think it is fitting to focus this week’s Storied Charlotte blog post on the upcoming visits to Charlotte by two nationally known poets—Nathan McClain and Jericho Brown.

Nathan McClain will give a poetry reading on Thursday, April 4, from 4:00 – 5:15 p.m. in Atkins Library’s Halton Reading Room on the main UNC Charlotte campus. McClain will read from his work, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.  One of the organizers of this event is Allison Hutchcraft, who is a creative writing professor at UNC Charlotte.  I contacted Allison and asked her for more information about this event. Here is what she sent to me:

Acclaimed poet Nathan McClain will visit UNC Charlotte on Thursday, April 4, visiting Allison Hutchcraft’s Intermediate Poetry Writing class (who recently finished reading McClain’s latest book of poems) and give a campus reading of his work in Atkins Library’s Halton Reading Room from 4:00 – 5:15 p.m.

Nathan McClain (he/him) is the author of two collections of poetry: Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and Scale (Four Way Books, 2017). He is a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a Cave Canem fellow. He earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His poems and prose have appeared in Plume Poetry 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.

Of Previously Owned, poet Diane Seuss has said, “The opening poem of Nathan McClain’s Previously Owned operates like the legend of a map, a key to the book’s existential topography. The poem’s presenting subject is a Roman sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, or ‘not pulling / rather, about to pull.’ McClain addresses the self via the second person, and draws in the reader, too, as observer: ‘and here you / are, looking,’ witness to the boy’s ‘insistent grief.’ ‘And what // have you learned from / standing here so long examining pain?’ Previously Owned exists in this incremental space—the about to pull, the almost, the grief, the tenderness, the examination, and the distance. It’s a masterstroke in a masterful collection, in which a speaker of a nuanced intelligence and lush interiority reflects upon the American landscape, its pastoral and judicial and historical duplicity entwined with racial alienation and violence. McClain has written a collection of sculptural artfulness—through which the thorn of grief thrums still.”

The poet Tommye Blount has said, “In Previously Owned, America’s dark history is not quaintly rooted in the past, but dangerously ever-present. ‘And what / have you learned from / standing here so long / examining pain?’ Nathan McClain questions in the opening poem ‘Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot’—not just the reader—himself as witness. If Scale, his first collection, can be said to be anchored in domestic space, then Previously Owned expands the architecture of that domestic space to include Country and the country. The ways in which McClain troubles the pastoral and peripatetic traditions thrills me: ‘I’ve never actually seen a moose, / only signs warning of moose, / and NO PASSING ZONE signs’ (‘Where the View Was Clearer’); and of the fireflies in ‘Now that I live in this part of the country,’ ‘look, they / flash the way hazard / lights sometimes flash… / and I might have said, no, / don’t they seem to pulse / with the glow of old / grievances?’ This book is a triumph and will be talked about for years. Nathan McClain is one of the most daring poets I know.”

Jericho Brown will perform and discuss his poetry as part of Charlotte Lit’s annual Lit Up! celebration on Wednesday, May 1 from 6:00-8:30 at Not Just Coffee, 1026 Jay Street, in Charlotte.  This is a ticketed event, and reservations are required.  The following information about this event is from Charlotte’s Lit’s website:

Join Charlotte Lit and Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown on May 1 for Lit Up! 2024, as we celebrate eight years serving the literary arts community. Jericho performs his work, then joins Charlotte Lit Press author AE Hines and audience members in a thought-provoking conversation. Enjoy live music, a wide selection of beverages, and hors d’oeuvres by Something Classic. 6:00-8:30 pm, Not Just Coffee, Jay Street.

Ticket Options:

  • General admission tickets include light bites and libations | $100 Members & their Guests, $150 Non-members [Purchase Here]
  • Limited VIP tickets include light bites and libations, priority reserved seating, a signed copy of one of Jericho’s books, and a VIP lounge with our featured guests | $250 Members Only [Purchase Here]

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues, 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. 

His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

I am excited that Nathan McClain and Jericho Brown are coming to Charlotte, and I am sure that the many readers and writers of poetry who live in Storied Charlotte are just as excited as I am. 

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