Poetry 'Hurricane' Willie Perdomo Speaks December 2 at Stony Brook Southampton

Award-winning poet Willie Perdomo will be the featured guest in the next Writers Speak event, a free author talk and reading open to the public at Stony Brook Southampton. Holman will speak on Wednesday, December 2, at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall.

Perdomo has been setting the literary world ablaze. Author and Boston Review fiction editor Junot Díaz has said of the East Harlem poet that “there is no poet alive who can match his lyrical intelligence, ferocious wit and searching humanity. Perdomo is the hurricane we all write home about.” The poet Martin Espada refers to Perdomo as “electric” while Publisher’s Weekly praises him as “a necessary and insistent voice in the current American literary scene.”

Perdomo’s most recent collection, The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon (Penguin Poets, 2014), was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. His book Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax Press, 2003) won the PEN Beyond Margins Award and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (W.W. Norton & Company, 1996) was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. Other literary works include “Postcards of El Barrio” (Isla Negra Press, 2002), and his children’s book, “Visiting Langston” (Square Fish, 2005), which received the Coretta Scott King Honor.

A central figure in American-Puerto Rican poetry, Perdomo has been a recipient of a Woolrich Fellowship in Creative Writing at Columbia University and a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow twice, in 2001 and 2009. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, BOMB, Mandorla and African Voices. A member of the VONA/Voices faculty, he is currently teaches English at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Writers Speak Wednesdays programs are free and open to the public. The evenings begin with a brief reception at 6:30 p.m.; readings begin at 7 p.m., followed by a Q&A and book signing. All programs are held in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall at Stony Brook Southampton, 239 Montauk Highway, Southampton.

For more information, call 631-632-5030 or visit www.stonybrook.edu/mfa.