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Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons.
He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others.
He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University. Books mentioned, two by Montale: Collected Poems and The Second Art of Life.
[…] Ishion Hutchinson joined us on April 22 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic from Ithaca where he is an instructor at Cornell. Hutchinson said that the streets in Ithaca were deserted as a result of lockdown measures and while it is typically a quiet place, these circumstances – particularly in a now empty college town – create an eerie reality. For himself, he tends to be a homebody and so he is feeling grateful for a comfortable space to continue working and contemplate what is happening around us. Speaking to the strange disconnect of seeming normalcy when one is simply at home reading a book in the midst of what is going on around us, Hutchinson says, “you realize that we are all connected and the human hum, the noise in the distance, is part of what keeps us going and to have that suddenly turned down or off is scary.” He goes on to say there is going to be a need for greater connection to learn to endure the new realities that will be in place when the noise begins to bubble back – we will have to figure out how to find harmony moving forward. […]
[…] Ishion Hutchinson joined us on April 22 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic from Ithaca where he is an instructor at Cornell. Hutchinson said that the streets in Ithaca were deserted as a result of lockdown measures and while it is typically a quiet place, these circumstances – particularly in a now empty college town – create an eerie reality. For himself, he tends to be a homebody and so he is feeling grateful for a comfortable space to continue working and contemplate what is happening around us. Speaking to the strange disconnect of seeming normalcy when one is simply at home reading a book in the midst of what is going on around us, Hutchinson says, “you realize that we are all connected and the human hum, the noise in the distance, is part of what keeps us going and to have that suddenly turned down or off is scary.” He goes on to say there is going to be a need for greater connection to learn to endure the new realities that will be in place when the noise begins to bubble back – we will have to figure out how to find harmony moving forward. […]