Award-Winning Poet Gives Reading and Visits English Classes

Terrance Hayes, winner of the prestigious National Book Award for Poetry in 2010, visited Westminster April 11 and 12 as the 11th Westminster Poet. On Monday evening, he read selections from his four award-winning books of poems in the Werner Centennial Center and then he attended English classes the following morning.

Hayes is a professor of creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and is the author of “Wind in a Box” (2006), “Hip Logic” (2002), “Muscular Music” (1999) and “Lighthead” (2010), which won the National Book Award. His other honors include a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, three Best American Poetry selections and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

During the reading, Hayes talked about how most of his poems are about music and people. He also discussed his interest in persona poems and how this stemmed from doing a lot of impersonations as a youth. “A lot of what I am interested in is persona, projecting part of your identity,” he told the audience. “There is no one answer to what is going on in a poem. All kinds of things are happening. Multiplicity is what I like about poems.”


When he visited English classes the next day, he talked about growing up in South Carolina, his love of Scrabble and why he writes about what he does. Students took advantage of the opportunity to ask him questions about poems they read in class and why he wrote them. “I want to connect all that I do to poetry,” he explained. “I hope when you have finished reading a poet’s work, you have a sense of their relationship to the world. My poems come from my relationship to language.”

“Terrance Hayes is exactly the kind of poet the English Department had in mind when we began the Westminster Poetry Series 12 years ago,” said Michael Cervas, head of the English Department. “He's an incredibly accomplished poet who happens also to be an excellent reader of his own poems and an engaging teacher. Studying poetry will always be challenging for high school students, but poets like Terrance Hayes make it all worthwhile.”