2019 Seat in the Shade Poetry Series Kick-Off with Jericho Brown

A July of poetry reading and discussion of the poetic craft featuring top Georgia poets will be hosted by University of Georgia College of Education professor Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor for three Tuesday nights. The kickoff will be July 16.



This is the seventh year for the event titled, “Seat in the Shade: A Summer Poetry Reading Series.” The kickoff will feature award-winning poet Jericho Brown. Opening the evening will be Athens writer Deirdre Sugiuchi. 

Cahnmann-Taylor, a professor in the department of language and literacy education and founder of Poetry by and for Educators, developed the summer poetry reading series seven years ago in conjunction with her Writing Cultures poetry class.



Sugiuchi is finishing her fundamentalist boot camp memoir, Unreformed, which takes place at Escuela Caribe, a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Her work has been featured in Electric Literature, Guernica, the Rumpus and other places. Sugiuchi has been awarded residencies at the Albee Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Wildacres. She was a recipient of the Mark Austin Segura Award for Nonfiction. She is the co-founder and curator of Athens, Georgia’s New Town Revue music and literature series. She’s also a public school librarian.

Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Writer's Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection is The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019). His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.