Presented in collaboration with Kelly Writers House

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as the chapbooks Leading with a Naked Body with Leela Chantrelle and Poems in Conversation and a Conversation with Elizabeth Alexander. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She has written plays and lyrics for The Cherry, an Ithaca arts collective, and in 2018, her work was featured in Courage Everywhere, celebrating women’s suffrage and the fight for political equality, at National Theatre London. She was one of ten poets commissioned to write a poem for MOMA’s 2015 exhibition, “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.” Van Clief-Stefanon will read her poem “Migration” and talk with Professor Dagmawi Woubshet about the kinship between her poem and Lawrence’s series. She is an associate professor of English at Cornell University.