Terrance Hayes and Abdul Ali Speak out about "Scattered Clouds"

National Book Award winner, Terrance Hayes, and New Issues Poetry Prize winner, Abdul Ali, give their thoughts on the newest Reuben Jackson collection, "Scattered Clouds."

"Reuben Jackson's marvelous poems map the poles between ode and lamentation, politics and intimacy, sagacity and audacity. He writes for everyday neighbors, folkloric brothers, and imaginary sisters. He writes for Trayvon Martin as well as Frank Sinatra. He nimbly charts the broad spectrum of our lives and loves. I have admired Reuben Jackson's work for over twenty years. Scattered Clouds will alert old and new poetry fans to his fine, abiding talent."

—Terrance Hayes, National Book Award Winner, author of "American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin"

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Terrance Hayes is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow.

His first book, Muscular Music, won a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly. How to Be Drawn received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. Lighthead, was winner of the 2010 National Book Award.

"I would never want to live in a world where the words, poems, and loving offerings of Reuben Jackson do not exist."

—Abdul Ali, author of "Trouble Sleeping"

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Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping (2015), winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize selected by poet Fanny Howe. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Gargoyle, Gathering of Tribes, National Public Radio, The Washington Post magazine, New Contrast (South Africa), Poets Lore, on the websites of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation, and in the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems about Washington DC (2009), among other publications. He has received grants, awards, and fellowships from the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities, American University, College Language Association, and the Mt. Vernon Poetry Festival at George Washington University. He has taught writing at Towson University, Goucher College, and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Johns Hopkins University.