Poet and educator Tyree Daye to give lecture, poetry reading

JOHNSON CITY (Sept. 2, 2021) – Poet and educator Tyree Daye will visit East Tennessee State University on Wednesday, Sept. 8, for a lecture and poetry reading. 

Daye’s appearance at ETSU is the inaugural event in the Black American Writers Series presented by the university’s Black American Studies Program, with additional support provided by the Bert C. Bach Written Word Initiative and Department of Literature and Language.

His lecture, “Nina Simone and Tone,” will begin at 2 p.m. in The Cave in the D.P. Culp Student Center. Later, at 7 p.m. in the Culp Center’s Martha Street Culp Auditorium, Daye will give a poetry reading from his 2020 book, “Cardinal,” published by Copper Canyon Press. Both are free and open to the public.

Daye is a poet from Youngsville, North Carolina, and a teaching assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In addition to “Cardinal,” he is the author of “River Hymns,” published by the American Poetry Review (APR), and winner of the 2017 APR Honickman First Book Prize.

Daye is a fellow of the Cave Canem Foundation, an organization that is a home for the voices of African American poetry and that is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. He won the 2019 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellowship, was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-in-Residence at the University of California-Santa Barbara, and was a 2019 Kate Tufts Finalist. He was most recently awarded a 2019 Whiting Writers Award.

For more information, contact Dr. Daryl Carter, director of Black American Studies at ETSU, at 423-439-7429 or carterda@etsu.edu. For disability accommodations, call the ETSU Office of Disability Services at 423-439-8346.