Winter 2022 Lamont Poet
Reading in Assembly Hall
On Wednesday February 16th, award-winning poet Terrance Hayes will give a reading in Assembly Hall as part of Phillips Exeter Academy's 2021-2022 Lamont Poetry Series.
Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections: American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.
More information regarding Hayes' visit will be announced soon.
Fall 2021 Lamont Poet
Reading in Assembly Hall
Phillips Exeter Academy opened its 2021-2022 Lamont Poetry Series on Wednesday, October 20th with a reading by award-winning poet Maurice Manning.
Manning is the author of seven poetry collections Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001), selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, A Companion for Owls (2004); Bucolics (2007), The Common Man (2010), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, (2016); The Gone and the Going Away (2013), and Railsplitter (2019).
A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Guggenheim Foundation, Manning teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems and essays have appeared in various magazines and journals, including TIME, The Sewanee Review, Commonweal, and The New Yorker. (Sources: Copper Canyon Press and Poetry Foundation).
Lamont Poetry Series
The Lamont Fund, established in 1982 by Corliss Lamont, Class of 1920, and Jacquelyn Thomas, former Academy Librarian, supports the Academy Library's Lamont Poetry Series. Two poets are invited each year to give readings of their poetry and to attend English classes.
The first Lamont Poet, on April 27, 1983, was Jorge Luis Borges. He has been followed by more than 50 others, ranging from Denise Levertov and Seamus Heaney to Yusef Komunyakaa and C.K. Williams.
Each visiting poet is photographed and asked to present the library with a manuscript poem. These are then framed and hung in the Special Collections department on the fourth floor of the library.
The Lamont Fund also support the Lamont Younger Poets program. See our Lamont Younger Poets page for more information.