Arlene Keizer's Poems for Beauford Delaney

Arlene Keizer's Poems for Beauford Delaney

From The Beat by Knox County Public Library

November 15, 2025 · 9 min · Season 5 · Episode 6

About this episode

Arlene Keizer discusses her poetry and scholarship related to Beauford Delaney and the African Diaspora.

Arlene Keizer, an Afro-Caribbean American poet and scholar, writes about the literature, lived experience, theory, and visual culture of the African Diaspora. The recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, she later earned an MA in English and Creative Writing (Poetry) at Stanford University and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of  Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery  (Cornell UP), and her poems and articles have appeared in African American Review, American Literature, The Kenyon Review, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, PMLA, Poem-a-Day, TriQuarterly , and other venues.  Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black , her collection of poems about the African American painter Beauford Delaney, won the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in 2023 by the Kent State University Press. She is a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Links: Arlene Keizer   Arlene Keizer’s page at Pratt Institute   Interview with Arlene Keizer at Speaking of Marvels   “Canopy” in Poem-A-Day   Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black…

People in this episode

Host: Knox County Public Library

Guest: Arlene Keizer

Topics covered

  • poetry
  • African Diaspora
  • literature
  • visual culture
  • identity formation

Keywords

  • Arlene Keizer
  • Beauford Delaney
  • poetry
  • African American literature
  • identity
  • visual culture
  • African Diaspora

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Pratt Institute, Kent State University Press, KnoxCountyLibrary.org

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