Observable Readings: Derrick Austin & Janice Harrington
February 15, 2027 @ 7:00 pm
The reading will be held in-person at High Low.
Saint Louis Poetry Center welcomes poets Derrick Austin and Janice Harrington for Observable Readings.
Books available for purchase from Left Bank Books.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
THIS ELEGANCE
Interweaving the sacred and the erotic, This Elegance engages with visual arts through the concept of sacra conversazione (“sacred conversation”), a style of Renaissance painting that imagines divine communion across time and space. Here, artists, thinkers, and pop icons commune in a similar sacred dialogue—Kathleen Collins, André Leon Talley, Richmond Barthé, Lyle Ashton Harris, Juan de Pareja, Janelle Monáe, Symone, and others appear as guiding spirits and creative kin.
For a Black, queer person so often dislocated from time and place, pleasure becomes an act of resistance—a grounding in the now. This Elegance is a love song—an offering to Black artistry, a tribute to visionary lives, and a testament to the power of beauty in even our most precarious moments.
YARD SHOW
Black history, cultural expression, and the natural world fuse in Janice N. Harrington’s Yard Show to investigate how Black Americans have shaped a sense of belonging and place within the Midwestern United States. As seen through the documentation of objects found within yard shows, this collection of descriptive, lyrical, and experimental poems speaks to the Black American Imagination in all its multiplicity.
Harrington’s speaker is a chronicler of yesterdays, using the events of the past to center and advocate for a future that celebrates pleasure and self-fulfillment within Black communities.
ABOUT THE POETS
DERRICK AUSTIN is a poet and art writer. He is the author of three poetry collections: This Elegance (Boa Editions 2026); Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016), selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. He has had poems and essays commissioned by The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Museum, Craft Contemporary, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, The Brick (formerly LAXART), The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He lives in Chicago.
JANICE HARRINGTON is a poet and children’s book author. A librarian who harbored a secret desire to write, in the mid-1990s Janice N. Harrington returned to an old dream of writing poetry. Every day before work, in the early hours of the morning, Janice wrote poem after poem, especially about her family and memories of the South. This led to her first book of poems, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, and to her most recent book, Yard Show, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and many other recognitions. Her first children’s picture book, Going North, is a winner of the Ezra Jack Keats Award. Her career as a children’s writer includes many picture books, including two picture book biographies plus a popular verse novel. Janice lives in Champaign, Illinois where she regularly visits local prairies, Black history sites, and any place that celebrates books. She is the Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
VENUE
The Observable Readings series is supported in part by:
