Pleasure Principle ft. Ama Codjoe & Jenny Xie

Pleasure Principle: Reading & Conversation with Ama Codjoe & Jenny Xie

Location: Cathedral of Learning, Room 332

Free & Open to the Public • Reception to Follow

Cathedral of Learning, Room 332

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Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award and a recipient of a 2024 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Currently, Codjoe is the 2025-2027 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

Jenny Xie was born in Anhui province, China. She is the author of Eye Level, a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University, and The Rupture Tense, a finalist for the National Book Award and the CLMP Firecracker Award, and a recipient of the Josephine Miles Award. Her chapbook, Nowhere to Arrive, received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Kundiman, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Vilcek Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Howard Foundation. She has taught at Princeton and NYU and is currently assistant professor of Written Arts at Bard College. She lives in New York City.