Solarities 4: Will Alexander and Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola

Hosted by Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto.
Solarities is a poetry reading series bringing established and emerging visiting writers to Duke. For our fourth event, we welcome poets Will Alexander and Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola.

Will Alexander is widely considered one of the most important living Black experimental poets in the US. His most recent poetry collection, Refractive Africa, was nominated for a Pulitzer Award. Alexander's over two dozen books of poetry include Across the Vapour Gulf (2017), Compression & Purity (2011), The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (2009), Asia & Haiti (1995), and The Stratospheric Canticles (1995). He has taught at many colleges and universities, including the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the University of California, and Hofstra University, among others. His collection Singing In Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose, Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture (2013) was awarded an American Book Award. Alexander was a 2022 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Mexico City-based Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola is an incredibly wide-ranging poet, musician, visual artist, and performer whose first book, The Telaraña Circuit, was published in 2023. She exhibits and performs in multiple media, fusing her poetic practice with sound, film, drawing and installation to explore the materiality and transmutation of language, archive, memory, and the ecology of sound. Her work also explores the somatic and improvisatory aspects of performance as a collective and collaborative practice. She has recently exhibited & performed at Vernacular Institute (Mexico City); Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City); Pequod Co. (Mexico City); Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City); The Poetry Project (NYC); Microscope Gallery (NYC); among others. She is the author of O (Cielo Abierto) and The Telaraña Circuit (Tender Buttons) and co-edits diSONARE, an experimental editorial platform from Mexico City.

Sponsored by FHI, Duke Arts, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Duke English.