POET OF THE WEEK

JUNE 22, 2025

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and School of Instructions: a Poem, a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

The genie says build a studio. I build 

a studio from ash. I make it out of peril and slum 

things. I alone when blood and bullet and all 

Christ-fucking-‘Merican-dollar politicians talk 

the pressure down to nothing, when the equator’s 

confused and coke bubbles on tinfoil to cemented wreath.

it’s a gift to find words or words finding me at this creative moment. Every poem is a miracle, and as it comes together, even if it fails, you have this sense of not being alone.

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