Modern Masters Reading Series 
Thursday, February 24th, 6pm 
4th Floor Program Room

  
Tom Sleigh is the author of several volumes of poetry, including The Chain, Far Side of the Earth, Space Walk, and Station Zed.  Space Walk won the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award and earned Sleigh considerable critical acclaim. His most recent collection The King’s Touch is due out from Graywolf, Feb 2022. Sleigh has received the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, an Individual Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Kellen fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the John Updike Award, also from the American Academy. As a dramatist, Sleigh has written several critically acclaimed plays, a multimedia opera, and a full-length translation of Euripides’ Herakles (2001). His prose collection Interview with a Ghost (2006) includes both literary and personal essays. 
 
Over the last decade, Sleigh has also worked as a long-form journalist in the Middle East and Africa, writing mainly on refugee issues. His work has taken him to Iraq, Syria, Libya, Jordan, and Lebanon, as well as Kenya and Somalia. A book of these essays The Land Between Two Rivers: Poetry in an Age of Refugees (2018) was published simultaneously with a companion book of poems, House of Fact, House of Ruin (2018). Sleigh is Distinguished Professor in the MFA program of Hunter College.