A short life of the author
Terrance Hayes (born 1971) is one of the most formally inventive and culturally alert American poets working today. His poems are simultaneously cerebral and physical, drawing on jazz, basketball, comic books, hip-hop, painting, and the daily texture of Black American life as raw material for poems that are architecturally complex and emotionally direct. He won the National Book Award for Lighthead (2010) and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014.
Life and Career
Hayes was born on 18 November 1971 in Columbia, South Carolina, and grew up in a working-class family. He played basketball on scholarship at Coker College (now Coker University), where he discovered poetry. He earned his MFA at the University of Pittsburgh, where he later taught for many years before joining the faculty at New York University.
His first collection, Muscular Music (1999), won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hip Logic (2002) deepened his engagement with popular culture and formal experiment: poems in the shapes of crosses, maps, and musical scores. Wind in a Box (2006) — poems in the voice of a persona called “The Buckhead Boys” — explored Black masculinity and Southern identity with a mix of swagger and vulnerability.
Lighthead (2010) was the breakthrough: National Book Award winner, it confirmed Hayes as a major poet. The collection ranges from poems about Fela Kuti and Etta James to the “golden shovel” — a form Hayes invented, in which each word of the last line of a Gwendolyn Brooks poem becomes the final word of each line in the new poem. The golden shovel has since been widely adopted by other poets and has become one of the few genuinely new poetic forms to emerge in the twenty-first century.
How to Be Drawn (2015) continued his experiments: persona poems, visual poems, poems that think about race and representation through the lens of visual art. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) — written in response to the Trump presidency — is his most focused and urgent collection: seventy sonnets, all sharing the same title, that circle around Blackness, threat, America, and the fraught relationship between the speaker and his “assassin” (which is variously a person, a country, a history, and a version of himself).
Key Works
- Lighthead (2010)
- American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018)
- Hip Logic (2002)
Collecting Hayes
Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999) — small-press debut — is scarce in first edition, $100–$300. Lighthead first edition (Penguin, 2010) signed brings $75–$200. American Sonnets first edition (Penguin, 2018) signed brings $50–$125. Hayes signs at readings and festivals. His limited-edition broadsides and chapbooks are collected separately. Penguin first editions of the major collections are the standard collected form.