Personal as Prelude: A Poetry Reading with Gabrielle Bates, Julia Guez, Luther Hughes, Dujie Tahat, and Tess Taylor
In this in-person reprisal of an October 2020 virtual event, Seattle-based poets Dujie Tahat, Luther Hughes, and Gabrielle Bates join Tess Taylor from El Cerrito, California, and Julia Guez from New York City to read original work that evokes bell hooks’s notion of “the personal as a prelude” for investigations into collective themes.
(Illustration: Juliana Barbosa)
This free event is occurring in person. Read Hugo House’s current COVID safety policy for in-person events here. We are continuing to track local, state, and federal health recommendations and guidelines as circumstances change and evolve. We will notify registrants of any updates to Hugo House’s COVID safety policy prior to the event.
About the Authors
Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat, forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Catapult, and elsewhere, and she occasionally teaches through Hugo House, the Rosenbach Museum, and the University of Washington Center in Rome. On Twitter (@GabrielleBates).
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in New York City. Four Way Books released her first full-length collection, In An Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also A Frame, in 2019. They will release her next book, The Certain Body, in 2022. Guez has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship, the John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation and a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her first book of poetry in translation, Equestrian Monuments by Luis Chaves, co-translated with the poet, Samantha Zighelboim, will be available from After Hours Editions this spring. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America; she teaches creative writing at New York University and Rutgers.
Luther Hughes is the author of the debut poetry collection, A Shiver in the Leaves, forthcoming from BOA Editions in September 2022, and the chapbook Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the founder of Shade Literary Arts, a literary organization for queer writers of color, and co-hosts The Poet Salon podcast. Recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship and 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize, his writing has been published in various magazines, journals, and newspapers. Luther was born and raised in Seattle, where he currently lives.
Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and The Forage House, called “stunning” by The San Francisco Chronicle. Work & Days was named one of The New York Times best books of poetry of 2016. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems. Last West was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art as a part of the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition; Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press, was hailed as “brilliant” in the LA Times and named one of the best books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. Taylor has served as on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered for over a decade. She is currently on the faculty of Ashland University’s Low-Res MFA Creative Writing Program.
Dujie Tahat is a Filipino-Jordanian immigrant living in Washington state. They are the author of three chapbooks: Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection; and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest and the Center for Book Arts honoree. Dujie has earned fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, Hugo House, Jack Straw Writing Program, and the Poetry Foundation, as well as a work-study scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast. Dujie serves as Critic-at-Large for Poetry Northwest and poetry editor for Moss. They got their start as a Seattle Poetry Slam Finalist, a collegiate grand slam champion, and Seattle Youth Speaks Grand Slam Champion, representing Seattle at HBO’s Brave New Voices. Dujie is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.
