Solarities 5: Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and fahima ife

The fifth and final reading in the Solarities series features Nathaniel Mackey and Joseph Donahue, both Duke poets, along with visiting poet fahima ife.

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently By Bent Light (The Bodily Press, 2025) and Double Trio (New Directions, 2021), a boxed set of three books: Tej Bet, So's Notice and Nerve Church. He is also the author of a multi-volume fiction work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fifth and final volume is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017), and two books of criticism, the most recent of which is Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (U of Wisconsin Press, 2005). He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry (2006), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation (2014), the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University (2015) and the Nicolás Cristobál Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2024). He is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Duke.

Joseph Donahue's most recent volumes of poetry are Musica Callada and Near Star (Verge Books, 2024), volumes four and five of his ongoing poem cycle, Terra Lucida, and Disfluency, Collected Uncollected Poems (2024). Other recent works are Wind Maps I-VII (Talisman 2018), The Disappearance of Fate (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and Infinite Criteria (Black Square Editions 2022). He is the co-translator of First Mountain, by Zhang Er. With Edward Foster he edited The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry, 1970-2000 (Talisman, 2002). He is Professor of the Practice in the English Department at Duke.

fahima ife is an American language poet and essayist practicing in experimental traditions. She is author of Septet for the Luminous Ones (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), abalone (Albion Books, 2023), Maroon Choreography (Duke University Press, 2021). As Associate Professor of Black Aesthetics & Poetics at the UC Santa Cruz's Division of Humanities in the department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.