Hilton Als in Conversation with Shane McCrae and Michael R. Jackson

Hilton Als (Photo by Ali Smith)

Overview

(Above photo credit: C Hilton Als/Ali Smith / L & R Courtesy of the guests)

Join The New Yorker‘s Hilton Als as he continues his residency exploring the ways poets and poetry reflect contemporary American life.

He’ll be joined by Shane McCrae, who shares his latest volume of poetry, The Gilded Auction Block, and composer Michael R. Jackson, who previews some of his new work.

Co-presented by the Academy of American Poets.

Michael R. Jackson holds a BFA and MFA in playwriting and Musical Theatre Writing from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts. As a songwriter, he has seen his work performed everywhere from Joe’s Pub to NAMT. He wrote lyrics and co-wrote book for the musical adaptation of the 2007 horror film Teeth with composer and co-bookwriter Anna K. Jacobs. He wrote book, music, and lyrics for the musicals White Girl In Danger and A Strange Loop (which will receive its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons Theatre in May of 2019). He has received a 2017 Jonathan Larson Grant, a 2017 Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award, a 2017 ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award, a 2016/2017 Dramatist Guild fellowship, and was the 2017 Williamstown Theatre Festival Playwright-In-Residence. He has commissions from Grove Entertainment & Barbara Whitman Productions and LCT3.

Shane McCrae is the author of six books of poetry: The Gilded Auction Block; In the Language of My Captor, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Animal Too Big to Kill, winner of the 2014 Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award; Forgiveness Forgiveness; Blood; and Mule. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for Talk of the Town. He became a staff writer in 1994, a theater critic in 2002 and chief theater critic in 2013. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing, a George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his work at The New Yorker in 2017. He is the author of the critically acclaimed White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the winner of the Lambda Literary Award in 2014, and a Professor at Columbia University’s Writing Program. Als lives in New York City.