Rewriting the Archive: Poetic Voices on Who Defines History, Sponsored by Alice James Books

Friday, March 6, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET

Ballroom I, Baltimore Convention Center, Level 400

Alice James Books presents a powerful panel of acclaimed poets whose work examines the historical record and challenges those who shape it. Iain Haley Pollock and Leigh Sugar read from All the Possible Bodies and FREELAND alongside Tyehimba Jess (Olio) and Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem). Moderated by Kondwani Fidel, the conversation explores the intersection of personal history and public record to deconstruct dominant narratives and redefine who is allowed space in the archive.

Panelist Bios:

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of two poetry collections, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020), winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, and When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon, 2012). She has received many honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Mellon Fellowship, and she has been the Rosenkranz Visiting Writer at Yale. Her work has been widely translated. She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at ASU, where she directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.

Kondwani Fidel and his poetry have become one and the same. The passion Fidel brings to his work has taken the Baltimore native around the globe to confront education reform, civil rights, and growing up in an underserved community. Fidel’s lyrical poetry has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, CNN, The Root, The Independent, Mic, and The Baltimore Sun. Fidel is the author of The Antiracist: How to Start the Conversation About Race and Take Action (2020), Hummingbirds in the Trenches, and Raw Wounds. He received his BA in English from Virginia State University and his MFA in creative writing and publishing arts from the University of Baltimore.

Photo credit: Shaun Champion


Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is a Distinguished Professor of English at the College of Staten Island.

Photo credit: John Midgley





Iain Haley Pollock is the author of the poetry collections Spit Back a Boy; Ghost, Like a Place; and the recent All the Possible Bodies (September 2025). His work has received several honors, including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award.  He directs the MFA program in creative writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, New York.

Photo credit: Daniel Freel




Leigh Sugar’s collection, FREELAND (Alice James Books, 2025), was a finalist for the Alice James Award and the Jake Adam York Prize. She created and edited That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions (New Village Press, 2023). A disabled and chronically ill poet, Sugar has an MFA from NYU and an MPA in criminal justice policy from John Jay College. She’s taught at the Poetry Foundation, the Institute for Justice and Opportunity, various prisons, and more.

Photo credit: Jodi Bullinger