Poet Ishion Hutchinson will deliver Vassar’s 2024 Elizabeth Bishop lecture. Hutchinson is the author of the poetry collections School of Instructions: a Poem, House of Lords and Commons and Far District. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others.

The event is free and open to the public.

The 2024 Elizabeth Bishop ’34 lecture is made possible through a gift by Priscilla H. Rockwell and H.P. Davis Rockwell, and by the English Department. Each year Vassar College invites a distinguished poet to give the Elizabeth Bishop Lecture, an endowed reading/lecture that honors the Vassar alumna whose papers are housed in our Special Collections Library