Terrance Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971 and educated at Coker College, where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. After receiving his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, he taught in southern Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Hayes taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh before becoming a Silver Professor of English at New York University.
Hayes’ first book, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999), won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006), a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. Lighthead (Penguin, 2010) won 2010 National Book Award. 2015’s How to Be Drawn (Penguin) received the NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Hayes’ sixth poetry collection, American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Library of Congress’ Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Literary Prize for Fiction & Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Award.
In 2023, Hayes published the collection So to Speak in tandem with the hybrid work of literary criticism Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry. His essay collection, To Float in the Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. His song cycle, Cycles of My Being, was made into a film by the Opera Philadelphia.
Hayes, who has received MacArthur, Guggenheim, and NEA fellowships, originated the “golden shovel” poetic form, inspired by Gwendolyn Brooks. He served as the 2017–2018 poetry editor for The New York Times Magazine and was guest editor of Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribner, 2014). His poems have appeared in ten editions of the latter series, among numerous other prestigious publications, and he has won several Pushcart Prizes. Hayes was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York City.
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More Terrance Hayes
Text: Read poems by Hayes at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Hayes speaks and reads at the International Poetry Forum
Audio: Hayes appears on the podcast Poetry Is Bread for a discussion with Bob Holman
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Photo by Kathy Ryan.