Radical Poetry Reading with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of 15 books of poetry. A Treatise on Stars and a new edition of her 1989 book, Empathy came out this year from New Directions. She is the 2021 recipient of the Yale Bollinger Prize for Poetry. Mei-mei lives in northern New Mexico and New York City.

is a poet. In 2020, she won a Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry, and a Cholmondeley Award, also for poetry. In 2021, her most recent book, How To Wash A Heart (Liverpool University Press) won the T.S. Eliot Prize. 2021 also brings a new edition of Incubation: a Space for Monsters from Kelsey Street Press, with new essays on performance and shame, and a preface by Eunsong Kim. After twenty years at Naropa University, where she taught across genres and disciplines, Bhanu is now a part of Churchill College, Cambridge, where she has recently been appointed an Extraordinary Fellow. This bio represents a complete change in the circumstances of Bhanu Kapil: a return to her birthplace (England), and a chance to keep working in the near-ground of colonial time.