On Sunday, March 15, the Katonah Poetry Series and Katonah Village Library are honored to present award-winning poet Iain Haley Pollock. A Westchester neighbor, Pollock writes with unflinching honesty about race, fatherhood, and what it means to live in a Black body in America. As Shara McCallum writes, "Fed by the past, pitched toward the future, Pollock's voice is one of abiding conscience."
"The traumas of racial prejudice are met with poise and thoughtfulness, even humor... [Pollock] moves nimbly from Michael Jackson's lyrics to American lynchings, from quarterbacks to police brutality." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"A gifted storyteller... an unflinchingly honest portrait of a mixed-race Black man, a father and teacher in contemporary America." —Shara McCallum
"A shapeshifter that keeps saying, in so many different ways, how varied, how complex the African-American poetic idiom is, how complex the American poetic idiom is." —Jake Adam York
Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections: All the Possible Bodies (Alice James Books, 2025), Ghost, Like a Place (2018), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and Spit Back a Boy (2011), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Elizabeth Alexander. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Progressive, and Kenyon Review. He has received the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry. A graduate of Haverford College, Pollock directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College and edits the literary journal Inkwell. He lives in Westchester County.
The reading will begin at 4:00 p.m. at the Katonah Village Library, 26 Bedford Rd, Katonah, NY 10536, and will be followed by a brief Q & A.