Jamaal May is the 2015 Poetry Arts Series poet. He will be speaking Monday, November 9th, at 1:45 p.m. in TEC-128.

May’s poetry uses images of technology past and present to render the “hum” that drives human identity and connection. Since Hum’s publication in 2013, May has won the Beatrice Hawley Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image award and Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Jamaal May was born in 1982 in Detroit, MI where he taught poetry in public schools and worked as a freelance audio engineer. His first book, Hum (Alice James Books), received the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, Foreword Review’s Book of the Year Silver Medal, an NAACP Image Award nomination, and was named one The Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2013.

In 2014 Jamaal received several honors including the Spirit of Detroit Award, The J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, as well as fellowships from Rose O’Neil Literary House, Lannan Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. Recent work appears from NYTimes.com, The New Republic, Poetry Daily, and Ploughshares. Poems have also been anthologized in Please Excuse this Poem: 100 Poems for the Next Generation (Penguin), 2015 Pushcart Prize Anthology (Pushcart Press), Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner), and elsewhere. Jamaal is currently a Kenyon Review Fellow and co-directs Organic Weapon Arts with Tarfia Faizullah.

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