The Kenyon Review 85th Anniversary Reading

Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World, published by Penguin Press and selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, published by Soft Skull Press and also a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Life Is Everywhere, published by Graywolf Press and a best book of 2022 with The New Yorker and the Seattle Times. Her short fiction is collected in the recent Cosmogony (Soft Skull Press, 2021). In spring 2020, Siglio Press published The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader, the first definitive anthology of poet-architect Gins’s poetry and prose, edited and with an introduction by Ives.Ives’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler, The Believer, The Chronicle of Higher Education, frieze, Granta, Harper’s, Lapham’s Quarterly, n+1, and Vogue, among other publications. For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy.A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She is currently Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University and was a recipient of a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Photograph by Will Matsuda

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place (Alice James, 2018), and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, September 2025).  His poems have received several honors including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry from Denver Quarterly, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award.  Pollock directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY.

Daisy Desrosiers is an interdisciplinary art historian and the current director and chief curator of Kenyon College’s Gund Gallery. She was previously the inaugural Director of artist programs at the Lunder Institute for American Art at the Colby Museum of Art at Colby College (Maine). Past exhibitions include Theaster Gates: The Black Image Corporation at Gropius Bau (Berlin, Germany), Sympathy For the Translator presented at the ICA (MECA) (Maine, USA) and No Justice Without Love, at the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC, USA) developed in dialogue with the Art for Justice community of artists and advocates. She was one of the co-curators of the First Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto Triennale titled GTA21 in 2021. Desrosiers was also part of the 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership cohort. Past fellowships include Nicholas Fox Weber curatorial fellow with the Glucksman Museum in Cork (Ireland) and a curatorial fellow at Brooklyn-based nonprofit, Art in General. She contributed to the 2021 New Museum Triennial publication and As We Rise (Aperture, 2021). She sits on the Board of Directors at the Art Gallery of the University College Cork, (Cork, Ireland).