Douglas Kearney has published eight books ranging from poetry to essays. In 2023, Optic Subwoof, a collection of his Bagley Wright lectures, won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize for Poetry Criticism and the CLMP Firecracker Award for Creative Nonfiction. His seventh, Sho, (Wave Books) is a Griffin Poetry Prize and Minnesota Book Award winner. Kearney’s most recent collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, was published with Wave Books in April 2025. Kearney is a Whiting Writers and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly awardee with residencies/fellowships including Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and The McKnight Foundation. He is a Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of English at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. 

The Poets & Writers Series is sponsored by the Temple University MFA Program in Creative Writing, with the assistance of the Department of English. Each year a number of poets and fiction writers are invited to read from and discuss their work to members of both the Temple community and the local Philadelphia arts scene. All events are free and open to the public.