University of Arizona Poetry Center Presents: Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Sealey Challenge
Thursday, March 18, 2027, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. CT
Join us to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Sealey Challenge, the annual August poetry reading initiative where participants read one book of poems each day during the month, for all 31 days. Hosted by founder Nicole Sealey, we’ll learn about how the challenge has grown and how you can participate, and hear from veteran Sealey Challenge readers as they recount some of their favorite Sealey Challenge reads—from surprising new discoveries to enduring favorites.
Panelist bios:
Lisa Lucas is an arts administrator and literary consultant based in Brooklyn and Chicago. Previously, she was a senior vice president at Knopf Doubleday, serving as publisher of both Pantheon Books and Schocken Books, the National Book Foundation’s executive director, Guernica’s publisher, and the Tribeca Film Institute’s director of education..
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Danez Smith is the author of four collections, including Don’t Call Us Dead, Homie, and most recently Bluff, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They are also the curator of Blues in Stereo: The Early Works of Langston Hughes. For their work, Danez won the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Danez lives in the Twin Cities and teaches in the Randolph College MFA program. Their fifth collection of poems, Love Time, will be published in September 2027.
Photo Credit: Anna Min
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times bestselling author of the poetry collection Night Owl and two illustrated essay collections, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees and World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. Other award-winning poetry books include Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-In Volcano, and Miracle Fruit, and she is coauthor with Ross Gay of the chapbook Lace & Pyrite. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. Honors include poetry fellowships from US Artist Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Nezhukumatathil is poetry editor for the Sierra Club’s magazine, Sierra. A professor of English and creative writing for over 25 years, she also serves as a firefly guide for Mississippi State Parks.
Photo Credit: Dustin Parsons
Eduardo C. Corral is the son of Mexican immigrants. He’s the author of Guillotine, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis.
Nicole Sealey is author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, winner of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, and an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is also the author of Ordinary Beast, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. With poet John Murillo, she edited the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems, For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa. Sealey’s honors include the Princeton Arts and Hodder Fellowships, a Cullman Center Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Literature, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, the Poetry International Prize, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is currently a distinguished lecturer in the Department of English at Hunter College.
Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths