This podcast contains explicit content.Terrance Hayes won the National Book Award for the 2010 poetry collection Lighthead. Praised for their elegantly evocative imagery and formal versatility, his other collections include Wind in a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. Hayes’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, among a litany of other publications. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, and a highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. He currently teaches English at the University of Pittsburgh. Drawing on his background as a visual artist, Hayes’s new collection ponders existential notions about how we see and are seen.

Paul Beatty’s first novel, The White Boy Shuffle, was called “a blast of satirical heat from the talented heart of black American life” (New York Times). His subsequent two novels, Slumberland and Tuff, are similarly raw ruminations on race, pop culture, and life lived against the stream. Beatty, winner of the first ever Grand Poetry Slam of the Nuyorican Poets Café, is also the author of two collections of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank and Joker, Joker, Deuce. The Sellout is a tragicomic satire of isolation, agrarian ghettoes, the last surviving Little Rascal, gerrymandering, and police brutality.

The authors answered questions about inspiration, revision, doing the work, and knowing when to put the pen down.