‘Welcome Beck’ Thursdays presents Marcus Jackson and Ruth Awad

Denison University's Beck Series presents “Welcome Beck” Thursdays with poets Marcus Jackson and Ruth Awad. Register to receive the Zoom link for our “Welcome Beck” Thursdays events, the virtual reading series of Denison University, highlighting the best in fiction, poetry, journalism, and scholarship at bit.ly/beck-events. 

Jackson’s poems have appeared in such publications as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. Of Jackson’s second book of poems, “Pardon My Heart,” Jeff Gordinier for The New York Times writes, “Jackson’s collection confirms the arrival of a thrilling new voice in American poetry, one whose writing, on page after page, has the fullness and glow of a jubilee.” Jackson lives with his wife and child in Columbus, Ohio, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts programs at the Ohio State University and Queens University of Charlotte. 

Awad is an award-winning Lebanese-American poet whose debut poetry collection, “Set to Music a Wildfire,” won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, and elsewhere. 

Books will be for sale through Granville’s independent bookstore, Reader’s Garden. Orders can be placed via Instagram (readersgardenohio) or by contacting readersgardenohio@gmail.com, for delivery to campus or store pickup in Granville. 

This event series is funded by the Harriet Ewens Beck Endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a gift by alumna Sue Douthit O’Donnell.