Monday Poets is one of the longest continuously running programs at the Free Library, currently in its 28th season.

Join us for a very special virtual event on Monday, December 19 at 6:30 p.m. with Philadelphia Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews, accompanied by Phillip B. Williams.

Register for this free event now!

About the Authors

Airea D. Matthews, Philadelphia Poet Laureate

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Simon and Schuster, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.

Phillip B. Williams

Phillip B. Williams is the author of Mutiny, winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn. Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and others. He is the recipient of a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Bennington College and Randolph College low-res MFA.

Are you a published poet?  If so, we want to hear from you!  Please send us an email at ereflit@freelibrary.org and in the subject line include Monday Poets inquiry.

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