Join award-winning author of Prelude to Bruise and How We Fight for Our Lives, Saeed Jones as he shares his latest book, Alive at the End of the World. Pierced by grief and charged with history, this new poetry collection confronts our everyday apocalypses. Jones will be in conversation with fellow poet Marcus Jackson.

Registration for this free program is on Eventbrite.

KING ARTS COMPLEX, OHIO POETRY ASSOCIATION, and OHIO STATE’S CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM are Gramercy’s Community Partners for this poetry program. 

In haunted poems glinting with laughter, Jones explores the public and private betrayals of life as we know it. With verve, wit, and elegant craft, he strips away American artifice in order to reveal the intimate grief of a mourning son and the collective grief bearing down on all of us.

Drawing from memoir, fiction, and persona, Jones confronts the everyday perils of white supremacy with a finely tuned poetic ear, identifying moments that seem routine even as they open chasms of hurt. Viewing himself as an unreliable narrator, Jones looks outward to understand what’s within, bringing forth cultural icons like Little Richard, Paul Mooney, Aretha Franklin and Diahann Carroll to illuminate how long and how perilously we’ve been living on top of fault lines. As these poems seek ways to love and survive through America’s existential threats, Jones ushers his readers toward the realization that the end of the world is already here–and the apocalypse is a state of being.

Saeed Jones was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Lewisville, Texas. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, and GQ, and he has been featured on public radio programs including NPR’s Fresh Air, Pop Culture Happy Hour, It’s Been A Minute with Sam Sanders, and All Things Considered. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his dog, Caesar, and tweets @TheFerocity.

Marcus Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Neighborhood Register (2011) and Pardon My Heart (2018). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. A Cave Canem fellow, Jackson is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Ohio State University and teaches in the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte. He lives in Columbus with his wife and daughter.

PURCHASE TICKETS