Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes

About Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes, born November 18, 1971 in Columbia, is an African-American poet and university professor. He published his first book of poetry, Muscular Music in 1999. This volume received a Whiting Writers' Award and The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. His second collection, Hip Logic (2001) received the National Poetry Award Series and his collection Lighthead (2010) won a National Book Award for Poetry. In 2014, he received the MacArthur Prize. In 2015, he published How to Be Drawn followed by American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), which received the 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for poetry, the 2020 Bobbitt Prize, and was a finalist for the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and was shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. His essay collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
He was elected in 2017 chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and served as the 2017-2018 poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Terrance Hayes resides in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.

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