Poetry Reading with Taylor Johnson

Tuesday, May 31, 2022,   at 7:00pm

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - FREE

A reception with refreshments will follow the program

The Arts Club welcomes Taylor Johnson for a poetry reading. Taylor Johnson is from Washington, DC. He is the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), winner of the 2021 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His work appears in Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging Writers from Lambda Literary. Taylor is the inaugural 2022 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum.

Lauded as "one of the more important and nuanced writers to come out of DC," Johnson's poems showcase warmth and musicality, and a concern with multiple identities, as in the poem Aubade:

There is much to do. The room is red

because we are indecent. The light gives me up.

I've made myself at home: I sit on your porch,

watch -- the light leads the field past the dumpsters

amber to green; all the wasps huddle in the weaker part

of the rocking chair; briefly, I see my breath then I don't.

I talk to my other love on the phone about certain sounds

some birds make down here this early, not their particular music

but their surety, how they seem to know only one song

and to sing it to its bleating end:

O to call your name only, to be that sure.

Following the reading there will be an opportunity for questions and a reception.

RSVP required

Discounted parking (free for members with membership card) at 2001 Pennsylvania Ave. after 6 pm.