In Conversation: Terrance Hayes & Nick Laird

The Seamus Heaney Centre’s Professor Nick Laird joins US poet Terrance Hayes, in conversation with students from Queen’s University Belfast. Their conversation took place in December 2020, and it is the second in a series of online events with Nick and other internationally renowned poets.

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Terrance Hayes is currently based in New York where he is Professor of English at New York University.

Hayes has a wide-ranging creative practice, making paintings, drawings, and video works, as well as poems and essays. His latest collection American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

His work frequently appears in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, and many other literary journals. Hayes has won numerous awards including a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Pittsburgh.

International Poets’ Series