Hosted by Andover’s Isham Fellowship, 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner and poet Tyehimba Jess read poetry to Andover last Friday.
The poet Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and 2025 Andover Isham fellow, hosted a poetry reading on campus last Friday, followed by a Q&A segment. Jess presented a wide selection of his poems, some from his acclaimed poetry book Olio and others from his upcoming works.
Andover’s Isham Fellowship, established in memory of former student Sandra Isham, brings poets to campus so they can share their work with Andover. The effort to host Jess was led by Kate McQuade, an instructor in the English Department. Leon Calleja, head of the English department, discussed how Jess was chosen to become Isham Poet.
“It’s a pretty informal process for choosing the [Isham] poet. The faculty members in the department draw up a list of eminent poets whom we think would be engaging for our students and the community. In the case of Jess, we had a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet with just the right mix of poetic voice, performative presence, and remarkably inventive skill in playing with form. We knew he would engage the audience,” wrote Calleja in an email to The Phillipian.
In an interview with the Phillipian, Jess described his evolving interest in poetry as he grew up. Although Jess temporarily stopped writing poetry in college, he was brought back into it after support from one of his instructors, eventually motivating him to write his first book.
“It started when I was 15 and I got second prize in this poetry competition in Detroit run by the NAACP Academic Olympics. That gave me a bit of a pat on the back. I then went to college, and I got discouraged from being a poet there as an English major. I became a public policy major and stopped writing for a while. Then I had a class with a guy called Sterling Plumpp, who turned me around back onto poetry and was at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I had class with [him] and he awakened me…He made me really understand and go on where I was headed,” said Jess.
Jess continued, “He brought me back into poetry and I started writing again and wrote a chat book back in 1993. I was going to open mics and whatnot, and from then on, I started writing more regularly. Eventually, I became part of a fellowship called Cave Canem, and they helped me on my way [to] a fellowship of Black Poets. Around 2002, I went to get my MFA, and I wrote my first book, got published, and here we are.”
Jeannie Kang’s ’28 passion for writing prompted her decision to attend the talk. She noted that she was interested in the process behind creating stories. Kang also mentioned that her English teacher provided extra credit for attending, which was a source of motivation for other students as well.
“There were two main incentives: first, I am really passionate about writing and wanted to learn more about poetry. I wanted to hear more about the process of coming up with story ideas and empowering people through writing about their stories. Also, my English teacher told us that she will give us extra credit if we attend, which also contributed to the decision to attend,” said Kang.
Christian Robinson ’28 enjoyed Jess’s ability to incorporate music into his poems, an aspect that brought the poems to life. He also appreciated the depth of the characters in the poems, which helped him be more engaged with Jess’s writing style.
“I really liked how he incorporated music, especially the harmonica, hearing it and being there in the moment. It felt like really telling, not showing…I think a lot about the characters he talked about, like Blind Boone. A lot of those different characters I never knew what they went through, and it was really informing [to hear Jess talk about them],” said Robinson ’28.
Thiago Jollon ’27 particularly enjoyed Jess’s contrapuntal poems, noting that their intricacy evoked emotion regardless of the way they were read.
“I like the implicit cleverness and wit required for good evocative poetry, and I thought that Jess really embodied that ideal. Especially with one of his poems, it was the contrapuntal one, and you could tear it out of the book. You could read it many different ways, but it came out the same, and I thought that was very clever and very intellectual and very exciting,” said Jollon.
Jess recounted how he felt that poetry readings were an occasion in which young people could be given a space to relate personally to poetry.
“I like the fact that being able to impress young poets with the idea that they can own poetry, they can be part, that it can be something that can speak to them through history and through form, and that they can see somebody who is trying to make it personal to them. Those are some of the things that make [poetry] exceptional,” said Jess.
