Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes, often referred to as one of the most compelling new voices in American poetry, didn’t always want to be a poet: while attending undergraduate school at Coker College on a basketball scholarship, Hayes identified primarily as a painter. He only recently described himself a poet after his first book was published in 1999.

His two collections of poetry, Hip Logic and Muscular Music, indicate Hayes’ far-reaching interests. The cover of Hip Logic features an oil painting by Hayes, and his poems focus on such topics as music, art, fatherhood, cultural heritage, African American and male identity, and cultural icons such as Frida Kahlo, Shaft, Mr. T, Audre Lorde, and Big Bird. “Writing poetry is a window for your life,” Hayes says; his fusion of art, poetry, and culture, told through experimental forms such as prose poems and mock sonnets, advances Hayes’ desire to surprise and understand himself.

The critically acclaimed Muscular Music received the 1999 Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hip Logic won the National Poetry Series Open Competition Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Hayes’ poems appear in such anthologies as American Poetry: The Next Generation and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, and in such journals as Fence, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Chelsea, and Callaloo.

“Terrance Hayes is one elegant poet. First you'll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you'll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.” —Cornelius Eady

“There is always a spiritual question driving the poetry of Terrance Hayes. What does it mean to be a black man? What does it mean to be an artist? He dances at the crossroads. Here is a brilliant and compassionate poet inventing new doorways for the heart."               —Toi Derricotte

“Terrance Hayes knows why a poem stops; why it turns; why it laughs and sits down; why it wants to be alone and why it wants to stand in company; why it groans, sobs, and dances; why it leaves the room looking for something else and why it never finds it. He knows why a poem hides, why a poem runs through the streets naked, why it blurs and sharpens and why it talks straight and crosses its heart.” —Fanny Howe

“His range…is that of a bold virtuoso and a fearless chronicler of character: Big Bird, Paul Robeson and Balthus all sound off in these revelatory poems.” — Los Angeles Times

Hayes earned a graduate fellowship and master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. He has held fellowships at the Breadloaf Writers Conference and Provincetown Summer Writing Program, and currently teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University. When teaching his students, Hayes tries to expose them to all kinds of poets. “Getting someone turned on to poetry is finding whom they like,” Hayes explains, “and they'll never know unless they have a teacher.” Hayes lives in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife and their daughter.

Terrance Hayes will teach a poetry class, "New Shadows: The Art of Inventive Poetic Imitation," at the 2004 conference.

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