Rodrigo Toscano Reading on Sept. 7 in Hanes Art Gallery

Poet, essayist, and labor-environmental activist Rodrigo Toscano will give a reading at 5 p.m. on September 7, 2022, in Hanes Art Gallery.  This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the William R. Kenan Jr. Professorship in the Humanities and the Department of English. 

The author of ten books of poetry, Toscano is a poet and essayist based in New Orleans. His latest book is The Charm & The Dread (Fence Books, 2022); his previous books include In Range, Explosion Rocks Springfield, Deck of Deeds, and Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection). Toscano received a New York State Fellowship in Poetry, and won the Edwin Markham prize. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, and National Day Laborers Organizing Network, working on educational / training projects that involve environmental and labor justice, health and safety culture transformation, and immigrant worker rights. A new collection of poems, Cut Point, is forthcoming from Counterpath in 2023.

A selection of Rodrigo Toscano’s poetry and writings can be found on his website, rodrigotoscano.com. You may also find his work on poetryfoundation.org.

 Read more about his latest collection, The Charm and the Dread, from Fence Books: “Always an astute observer of tectonic shifts in political culture, Toscano plumbs the inter-locking crises that have kicked us into these 2020’s. From formal sonnets to high-speed screeds unspooling syntax, uncanny portraiture to earnest inquiry and appeal to specks of emergent new moralities, Toscano’s ninth collection is a guidestar for our time.”