Holloway Poetry Series

The Holloway Poetry Series is sponsored by the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is funded through an Endowment made by Roberta C. Holloway in 1981. This generous fund has enabled us to establish a tradition of poetry on campus to celebrate the works of renowned and rising contemporary poets, and provide an opportunity for graduate student poets from the UC Berkeley campus community to introduce and read alongside a featured poet.

Each academic year the Holloway Series honors one distinguished poet with a residency at the University of California, Berkeley, formally known as the Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry. Residents teach a semester-long creative writing workshop, are welcomed in the annual fall faculty poetry reading, and give a featured reading in the Holloway Series.

The Mixed Blood Project (in combination with the Holloway Series) is a poetry journal and organization founded and led by Cecil S. Giscombe. The Mixed Blood series is interested in the contemporary African-American avant-garde, writers who are experimenting with form and content in the long post-Black Arts moment; but it is also interested in experimental practices (post-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, e.g.) more commonly associated with white writers. The series is quite unusual in its emphasis on literary innovation and its deliberate and very aggressive emphasis on race and the languages of and about race. Each year a poet is invited to give a talk and a poetry reading.

Cecil Giscombe, Geoffrey G. O'Brien; Jessica Laser, Rebecca Nieto (co-curators)