Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

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Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series provides poets with an opportunity to explore poetics in-depth & present a series of public lectures at partner venues.

Charlie Wright, Publisher of Wave Books, established the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry in memory of his late father, the businessman and philanthropist Bagley Wright. The Lecture Series seeks to provide leading poets with the opportunity to explore in depth their own thinking on the subject of poetry and poetics, and through financial and logistical support, to arrange for the delivery of

several lectures that result from these investigations. A main goal of the Series is to provide mid-career poets with the opportunity to explore subjects of deep interest to them in a way that would not otherwise be possible without this support. Another goal of the Series is to create lasting works of criticism and poetics that will help current practitioners in the art of poetry, along with scholars and general readers, to more fully understand poetry as it is written and read in our time. Lectures will be delivered publicly in partnership with several institutions, including the Library of Congress, New York University, Harvard University, the Poetry Foundation, and Seattle Arts and Lectures, as well as a number of other venues. The following poets have been named as Lecturers for the upcoming two years of the Series:

Dorothea Lasky, Fall 2013

Joshua Beckman, Spring 2014

Timothy Donnelly, Fall 2014

Terrance Hayes, Spring 2015

Srikanth Reddy, Fall 2015

Rachel Zucker, Spring 2016

Sign up for our mailing list here: https://twitter.com/BWLectures

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05/05/2026

Happy pub day to Renee Gladman and THEORY FOR MOVING HOUSES (Wave Books)! ✨ ⚡️ ✨

“You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.”

So begins Renee Gladman’s Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels (), ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

🔗Link in bio to order.

And a reminder that Season 11 of the BWLS Podcast delivers a/v of Renee Gladman’s lectures, given in partnership with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at ASU. All episodes available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

🔗 Links in bio to listen.

04/29/2026

🎧11.3 Renee Gladman: “Lines Into Grasses”🎧 out now on the BWLS Podcast 〰️🌱

Welcome to the third and final episode of Season Eleven of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry podcast.

Season Eleven features a trio of linked lectures written and delivered by Renee Gladman during her time as a Bagley Wright Lecturer, in 2020 and 2021. Gladman shared these lectures over Zoom during Covid, in partnership with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at .

These linked lectures, broadly titled “Am I A Fiction? // Three lectures on Invisibility, Fictional Knowing, and Writing-Drawing” explores the perplexities, epiphanies, inventions, and other phenomena that have been central to Renee Gladman’s writing and drawing practices over the past two decades as well as indispensable to the shaping of her Ravicka series (⁠⁠). These talks roam through several questions: How do we envision a future space or future city that can both recognize and nourish bodies that are exiled, fractured, othered, multiple, or ever shifting? How do we cultivate relationships with the non-known and non-visible forms that energize and make mysteries of our work and our living? And how do we sustain work across varying fields of thought and media?

Today, we’ll hear the final lecture in this trio, “Lines Into Grasses,” given November 4, 2021.

To view the series of drawings that Renee shares in the video accompaniment to this lecture, please visit the ⁠BWLS website⁠.

Gladman’s book of collected BWLS lectures, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Theory for Moving Houses⁠, is forthcoming from Wave Books, and is available ⁠⁠for preorder (link in bio)⁠.

Visit us at our website, bagleywrightlectures.org, for more information about Bagley Wright lecturers, as well as links to supplementary materials on each lecturer’s archive page, including selected writings.

04/22/2026

🎧11.2 Renee Gladman: “Figuration: Transversal Properties of Fictional Knowing” 🎧 is now up on the BWLS podcast. ✨

Season Eleven features a trio of linked lectures written and delivered by Renee Gladman during her time as a Bagley Wright Lecturer, in 2020 and 2021. Gladman shared these lectures over Zoom during Covid, in partnership with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at .

These linked lectures, broadly titled “Am I A Fiction? // Three lectures on Invisibility, Fictional Knowing, and Writing-Drawing” explores the perplexities, epiphanies, inventions, and other phenomena that have been central to Renee Gladman’s writing and drawing practices over the past two decades as well as indispensable to the shaping of her Ravicka series (). These talks roam through several questions: How do we envision a future space or future city that can both recognize and nourish bodies that are exiled, fractured, othered, multiple, or ever shifting? How do we cultivaterelationships with the non-known and non-visible forms that energize and make mysteries of our work and our living? And how do we sustain work across varying fields of thought and media?
Today, we’ll hear the the second of these lectures, “Figuration: Transversal Properties of Fictional Knowing,” given October 28, 2021.

To view the series of drawings that Renee shares in the video accompaniment to this lecture, please visit the BWLS website at bagleywrightlectures.org.

Gladman’s book of collected BWLS lectures, Theory for Moving Houses, is forthcoming from Wave Books, and is available at the link in bio.

04/15/2026

🎧NOW PLAYING🎧 Renee Gladman’s “Theory for Moving Houses,” given October 21, 2021 in collaboration with sonic artist & composer Mauricio Pauly.

Season 11 of the BWLS Podcast features a trio of linked lectures written and delivered by Renee Gladman during her time as a Bagley Wright Lecturer, in 2020 and 2021.

Gladman shared these lectures over Zoom during Covid, in partnership with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.

These linked lectures, broadly titled “Am I A Fiction? // Three lectures on Invisibility, Fictional Knowing, and Writing-Drawing” explores the perplexities, epiphanies, inventions, and other phenomena that have been central to Renee Gladman’s writing and drawing practices over the past two decades as well as indispensable to the shaping of her Ravicka series (Dorothy, a publishing project). These talks roam through several questions: How do we envision a future space or future city that can both recognize and nourish bodies that are exiled, fractured, othered, multiple, or ever shifting? How do we cultivate relationships with the non-known and non-visible forms that energize and make mysteries of our work and our living? And how do we sustain work across varying fields of thought and media?

Gladman’s book of collected BWLS lectures, Theory for Moving Houses, is forthcoming from Wave Books, and is available to preorder at the link in bio. ⚡️Renee Gladman Mauricio Pauly

03/19/2026

📣 One week from today! 📣 3/26 @ 7 PM CDT at : “Pregrettably Yours: On Being Influenced,” by Anselm Berrigan. In-person and online!

This Bagley Wright Lecture is on being influenced (thinking of influence as a site of openness, and pleasure-not anxiety), with a focus on growing up in a family of poets and starting to write. 🌱

11/25/2025

✨Wednesday, December 3✨: Anselm Berrigan gives a talk called “Pregrettably Yours: On Being Influenced,” 7pm, free, at (& reads poems on 12/4!)

This Bagley Wright Lecture is on being influenced (thinking of influence as a site of openness, and pleasure - not anxiety), with a focus on growing up in a family of poets and starting to write. The talk opens up into a wider range of influences from there, including a semester spent working one-on-one with Allen Ginsberg, and Berrigan’s life-long conversations on poetry with his mother, Alice Notley.

> University of Arizona Poetry Center, Tucson, AZ -link in bio-

11/14/2025

✨✨✨May 5, 2026✨✨✨
Renee Gladman’s THEORY FOR MOVING HOUSES, the 9th in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series, out this spring from Wave Books. 🌾 Preorder link in bio.

09/04/2025

Fall events email just went out & it’s an exciting one! The next leg of ANSELM BERRIGAN’s lecture tour includes talks in Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago, & Tucson, & the BWLS is so pleased to be partnering with , , , & for these events. ✨✨

04/14/2025

Thanks to Valerie Duff-Strautman and the for reviewing Srikanth Reddy’s THE UNSIGNIFICANT ()! 🔗 in bio

04/04/2025

So many great poetry convergences next weekend at ! Save the date for Anselm Berrigan’s talk, Sunday at 2pm, link in bio for details. (Catch him reading poems with a stellar lineup on Saturday as well)

Address

1508 E Helen St
Tucson, AZ
85721-0150

Website

http://www.bagleywrightlectures.org/, http://www.twitter.com/BWLectures

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