Ishion Hutchinson

Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections: House of Lords and Commons (2016) and Far District (2010). Since the publication of his debut, Hutchinson has received numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2017), a National Book Critics Circle Award (2016), and a Whiting Award (2013). Critic Dan Chiasson has described Hutchinson’s work as “punk-baroque and brat-belletristic”: his taut, tensile lines are marked not only by an unerring sense of the music of English and Jamaican patois, but by an astonishing and virtuosic mastery of sound and register. His poems flick from the continent to the islands and back again, tapping Martin Heidegger and Peter Tosh, Derek Walcott and Saint-John Perse, Sir Thomas Browne and Lee “Scratch” Perry. In almost every poem, Hutchinson returns to questions of empire and environment, and to the problem of what it means to be a finite, mortal creature in a finite, mortal world, blessed and cursed, remembered and remembering: “A cloud has eaten your voice and I your dust; / yes, you weigh heavily on me, friend, / who no longer knows the way to die.” A contributing editor to the journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art, Hutchinson lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Cornell University.