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51���� will host a virtual reading and conversation with award-winning poet and essayist Brandon Shimoda March 12.

The public is invited to campus to a watch gathering at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 12, in room 209 of the William E. and Ann L. Swan Business Center.

Poet Solmaz Sharif, a National Book Award finalist, describes Shimoda’s work as containing “a clarity born of deep spiritual and political reckoning.”

Shimoda’s work, in part, responds to the enduring consequences of the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese individuals and families in the United States, what is often referred to as the policy of Japanese internment.

Shimoda is a 2020 Whiting Fellow and the author of books of poetry and prose, including “The Afterlife is Letting Go” (City Lights, 2025), winner of the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, “Hydra Medusa” (Nightboat Books, 2023), “The Grave on the Wall” (City Lights, 2019), which received the PEN Open Book Award, and “Evening Oracle” (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.

He is also the co-editor, with Thom Donovan, of “To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader” (Nightboat Books, 2014) and, with Brynn Saito, “The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration” (Haymarket Books, 2025).

Shimoda lives in Colorado Springs and teaches at Colorado College. This event is sponsored by St. Bonaventure’s English Department, Literary Publishing and Editing Program, and Visiting Scholars Committee.

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About the University: The nation’s first Franciscan university, St. Bonaventure is a community committed to transforming the lives of its students inside and outside the classroom, inspiring in them a commitment to academic excellence and lifelong civic engagement. Out of 167 regional universities in the North, St. Bonaventure was ranked #8 for value and #19 overall by U.S. News and World Report (2025).