Adrian Matejka (2014 Poetry)

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Distinguished Professor of English at College of Staten Island.   Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.  

A native of New York City, Smith grew up in South Florida, where he spent his youth observing, catching, and studying the insects, fish, and reptiles in the area. He continued his education in England, earning a doctorate in philosophy at the University of London, King’s College, where he studied the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. “These studies,” he said, “introduced me to the significance of evolutionary biology for understanding human nature, enabling me to come full circle by fusing my interest in the human mind with my earlier love of the natural world.”   Smith is the author of Why We Lie (2004) and The Most Dangerous Animal (2007). His third book, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, illuminates the issue of dehumanization and the roots of human violence.

Adrian Matejka was born Germany in the town of Nuremberg. He grew up, partly in public housing, in California and Indiana. A graduate of Indiana University, Matejka earned an M FA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden, received the 2002 New York / New England Award from Alice James Books. His second collection, Mixology, won the 2008 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2010, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. He teaches creative writing at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he lives with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown, and their daughter. In this episode of The Asterisk*, 2014 AWBA poetry winner Adrian Matejka reflects on the life and legacy of boxer Jack Johnson, the subject of his award-winning collection, "The Big Smoke." In conversation with former Program Director Karen R. Long, Matejka explores how poetry can illuminate history, reclaim overlooked stories and reveal emotional truths that facts alone cannot capture. The discussion also traces Matejka’s journey from discovering poetry as a young reader to leading Poetry magazine. Along the way, he shares insights on creativity, mentorship and his latest collection, "Be Easy: New and Selected Poems."

Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. In addition to her poetry, Trethewey is the author of two memoirs The House of Being (2024) and Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On this episode of The Asterisk*, Natasha Trethewey sits down with Karen Long to discuss her life and career as a writer, as well as her book, "The House of Being", ahead of its release.

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Program Director Kortney Morrow sits down with Cleveland Public Library CEO Felton Thomas, Jr. and Cuyahoga County Public Library CEO Jamar Rahming to discuss the power and prestige of their award-winning library systems, as well as the latest on the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, including the 2026 Award Finalists. Learn more about the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and its 90+ year legacy at anisfield-wolf.org View the video version of this episode on our YouTube @AnisfieldWolf

Born in Stamford, Conn., Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, where as a young teenager he covered cricket for an international sports network. His second novel, “The Association of Small Bombs,” won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2017 and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Its chapter zero describes a 1996 car bomb blast in a New Delhi market, and the book becomes, as Elizabeth McCraken calls it, “a brilliant description of aftermath.” Both Mahajan has toggled between the literary and journalistic arts, and between India and the United States. He earned degrees from Stanford University and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin. When the novelist was 12, Kashmiri separatists set off a car bomb a few miles from his home. The 9-11 attacks brought that memory to the fore. The Asterisk* caught up with Professor Mahajan in October 2023 via Zoom. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island where he teaches literary arts at Brown University. His third novel, “The Complex,” is due out in early 2025.

Born 85 years ago in Chattanooga, Tenn., Ishmael Reed won the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award lifetime achievement prize for his six decades of as a poet, novelist, playwright, lyricist, cartoonist, musician and founder of small presses and publications – doing it all with curiosity, bite, and eventually a global reach. Celebrated as a teacher and for writing such groundbreaking novels “Mumbo Jumbo,” Reed was recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1998. Last year he dropped a jazz solo album, “The Hands of God,” and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent play, “The Conductor,” premiered in New York City this spring. Colson Whitehead, the 2002 A-W winner for fiction, once said, “Some folks dream about being in Harlem during the 20s…I’m sad I didn’t get to hang out in the late 60s Berkeley with Ishmael Reed.” Reed joined The Asterisk* via Zoom in August 2023 from his home in Oakland, Calif., with his wife and collaborator Carla Blank – who makes a couple of cameos on the episode. 

Born in Washington, D.C., Tony Marra won the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award prize in fiction for “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena” – his first novel that astonished critics with its verve and skill. The story, set in Chechnya, unfolds through the interlocking lives of six characters. And given the war in Ukraine, it remains uncannily topical. Madison Smartt Bell, himself an Anisfield-Wolf winner, wrote “This novel is, among other things, a meditation on the use and abuse of history, and an inquiry into the extent to which acts of memory may also constitute acts of survival.” The Asterisk* caught up with Marra in December 2022 in Iowa City, Iowa, where he was teaching at the University of Iowa following the release of his third book – “Mercury Pictures Presents” – in July of 2022. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife Kappy Mintie, a senior researcher at Yale’s Lens Media Lab. Marra earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California and a master’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Shane McCrae won a 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in poetry for “In the Language of My Captor.” A book about freedom told through stories of captivity, the collection features both prose memoir and poems in historical persona. These include a clutch in the voice of Jim Limber, the mixed-race child Jefferson Davis adopted in the final year of the Civil War. Anisfield-Wolf juror Rita Dove lifted up McCrae’s fifth collection of poetry, “These voices worm their way inside your head; deceptively simple language layers complexity upon complexity until we are snared in the same socialized racial webbing as the African exhibited at the zoo or the Jim Crow universe that Banjo Yes has learned to survive in: ‘You can be free//Or you can live.’” The Asterisk* caught up with McCrae in January 2023 from his office at Columbia University, where he teaches creative writing and edits the poetry journal Image. He lives in New York City with his wife Melissa and their daughter Eden. McCrae dropped out of high school and later earned a law degree from Harvard – the first in his family to finish college. His latest book, the memoir “Pulling the Chariot of the Sun,” publishes August 1. It describes his white grandparents’ kidnapping of him.

Percival Everett won a 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction for “The Trees.” The idea for the novel sprung from the traditional song “I Rise Up” and a Lyle Lovett cover of “Ain’t No More Cane” that Everett was listening to before playing a tennis game. At the time, he also happened to be researching lynching. What “The Trees” became, in the estimation of Anisfield-Wolf Juror Joyce Carol Oates, is a profound novel, “easily the most idiosyncratic, least classifiable work of fiction the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards has ever honored. This is a wickedly clever novel of ideas in the guise of genre fiction, a combination mystery, thriller, police procedural and absurdist comedy.” Everett joined The Asterisk* via zoom in June of 2023 from his home in Pasadena, Calif., where he lives with his wife, the novelist Danzy Senna. A distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California, he has written more than 30 books, including poetry, a Pulitzer finalist in “Telephone,” and his most recent effort, “Dr. No.” He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Miami and a master’s from Brown University. In April, Everett won the Windham Campbell Prize for his “virtuosic body of work (that) exemplifies fiction’s capacity for play, vigilance and compassion for life’s precarity in an uncertain world.”