Join poets Geffrey Davis and F. Douglas Brown as they read from and discuss poems from the co-written book of poetry Begotten. The friends met in 2012 while at the Cave Canem Retreat. In between workshops, readings, and laughter, they discussed fatherhood and the poetry that stems from it. The poems in Begotten, as well as their first full-length books, are a continuation of their conversations. They borrow from one another's poems, both in structure and in dialectic; they lift lines to create new lines; and in some cases, they write back and forth all in an effort to interrogate as many aspects and borders of fatherhood as they can handle.
Geffrey Davis is the author of two full-length collections: Night Angler (BOA Editions, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Named a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Davis has received the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Porter Fund Literary Prize, and the Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Whiting Foundation for his involvement with The Prison Story Project, which strives to empower incarcerated women and men in Arkansas to tell their own stories through writing. Raised by the Pacific Northwest, Davis currently lives with his family in the Ozarks. He teaches with the Program in Creative Writing & Translation at the University of Arkansas and with The Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran's low-residency MFA program. Davis also serves as Poetry Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018), and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Brown, an educator for over 20 years, currently teaches English and African American Poetry at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. He is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, and was selected by Poets & Writers as one of their ten notable Debut Poets of 2014. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets, The PBS News Hour, The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Bat City Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review (CQR), The Southern Humanities Review, The Sugar House Review, Cura Magazine, and Muzzle Magazine. He is co-founder and curator of un::fade::able - The Requiem for Sandra Bland, a quarterly reading series examining restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism. When he is not teaching, writing or with his children (Isaiah, Olivia, and Simone), he is busy DJing in the greater Los Angeles area.
