Poetry and Basketball

From the first Olympics in ancient Greece, where poets would gather to share their works and write poems for the victors, writers and athletes have competed with each other. Some modern writers, like panelists David Tomas Martinez, Philip Metres, and Tomas Q. Morin, sharpened their ball skills, their attention to detail, their verbal and non-verbal communication, and their team play, on the basketball court. This panel will explore the art of athletics and the athletics of art, calling a truce between the jocks and nerds once and for all.

PRESENTERS
Philip Metres has written numerous books, including Shrapnel Maps, Sand Opera, and The Sound of Listening. Awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations, and three Arab American Book Awards, he is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. On basketball courts ranging from Chicago and Moscow, he was a gym rat, wing man, and slasher.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Machete and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways. He is also a translator, editor, and essayist. He teaches at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is always open in the paint on a backdoor cut.

David Tomas Martinez's work has been published or is forth coming in Poetry Magazine, Plough Shares, Tin House, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Forklift; Ohio, Poetry International, LitHub, Gulf Coast, Academy of American Poet's Poem-A-Day, Poetry Foundation's PoetryNow, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and others. Martinez has an MFA from San Diego State University, is the former reviews and interviews editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts, and has been a Breadloaf and CantoMundo Fellow. His debut collection of poetry, Hustle, was released in 2014 by Sarabande Books, and his latest collection, Post Traumatic Hood Disorder, was published in 2018, also by Sarabande Books. He is a Pushcart Prize winner, NEA recipient, and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Details: Poetry and Basketball takes place Thursday, July 15 from 7-8:30pm remotely through Zoom.