Terrance Hayes

When American poet Terrance Hayes’s children were young, he gave them a fun assignment: memorize a poem. For his five-year-old son he selected Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” (1959). After Hayes and his son recited the poem together, the exercise inspired him to write a poem of his own that incorporated Brooks’s words. The result was a new poetic form: the golden shovel.

Hayes’s inventiveness is typical of his work. In a 2018 interview he explained, “My approach to life and my work is not strategy. I’m someone who wants to experiment and play and see what happens, because it’ll be new no matter what it is.” Indeed, since his first collection in 1999, Hayes’s poetry has defied easy categorization. His best-known work experiments with traditional poetic forms and explores themes of African American identity, masculinity, fatherhood, music, and contemporary pop culture.

Family background and early interests

Hayes was born on November 18, 1971, in Columbia, South Carolina, to a teenage mother. When he was a toddler, his mother, Ethel Seabrook, married James L. Hayes, who worked as a barber in the U.S. military. Terrance Hayes would not know the identity of his biological father until he was an adult.

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Initially their family moved often because of his father’s career, but eventually Hayes, his mother, and his younger brother remained in South Carolina while his father was stationed elsewhere. His mother worked nights as a prison guard, and Hayes and his brother were often left alone to make their own entertainment. From a young age he was interested in art and painting, though he also enjoyed reading. His favorite writers as a teenager included William Shakespeare (especially his sonnets) and Southern authors such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Alice Walker, Flannery O’Connor, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

Education and experience at Cave Canem

After high school, Hayes attended Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina, on a full basketball scholarship. He studied painting and English, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1994. He went on to study creative writing in Pennsylvania at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1997. Of his switch from painting to poetry, Hayes told Pittsburgh City Paper in 2006, “I never did a painting and started weeping. But I would do that with poems. So I thought clearly, this is what my calling is.”

While in graduate school Hayes worked as an assistant at Cave Canem, a groundbreaking retreat for Black poets that was founded by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte, one of Hayes’s early mentors. The experience was eye-opening. In 2022 he told The Paris Review,

In the academy, it was like, Here’s the shelf for the Black poets. Here’s the shelf for the women. Here’s the shelf for the Asian poets. The rest of it is just art. But what I could see at Cave Canem was that Black people were brilliant, and there was no distinguishing their poetics from anybody else’s. They wrote in all kinds of different ways, and all that work was available and useful to me.

First poetry collections and ancestral discoveries

In 1999 Hayes published his first collection, Muscular Music, which received a Whiting Award. Its poems introduced many themes that would recur throughout his work, such as masculinity and pop culture. He followed up in 2002 with Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series contest. The collection’s pieces see Hayes playing with forms, such as sonnets and anagrams, and exploring topics of identity and fatherhood. Its last poem, “The Same City,” is a tribute to the man who raised him, but after writing it Hayes was compelled to begin searching for his paternal ancestry. As he explained to The Iowa Review in 2018, “If I didn’t answer that life question, I felt like I was going to be stuck in my work.”

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By his late teens Hayes had figured out that James Hayes was actually his stepfather. He told The Paris Review, “Neither of my parents talked about my biological father—­they sort of erased everything that had happened beforehand, and I never wanted any dad but the one who raised me.” Eventually, however, he learned his biological father’s name: Earthell (“Butch”) Tyler, Jr. In 2004 Terrance Hayes met Tyler, who told him that Hayes’s grandfather had been a decorated Vietnam War veteran. Hayes wrote about both men in “The Long Shadow of War,” an essay published in Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam Era (2006; edited by Samuel W. Black).

Lighthead and inventing the golden shovel

Hayes’s third collection, Wind in a Box, was published in 2006, followed by Lighthead in 2010. It was in this latter book that Hayes unveiled a new poetic form in a two-part poem titled “The Golden Shovel.” Essentially, the form uses a line from a preexisting poem to create a new one, with each word from the borrowed line serving as the last word of a line in the new poem. In Hayes’s poem the lines “We / Jazz June. We / Die soon” from Brooks’s “We Real Cool” become:

While God licks his kin, we
sing until our blood is jazz,

we swing from June to June.
We sweat to keep from we-

eping. Groomed on a die-
t of hunger, we end too soon.

Several poems in Lighthead are inspired by Pecha Kucha, a Japanese storytelling presentation format in which a presenter narrates 20 slides, each displayed for 20 seconds, to talk about a particular theme. “Arbor for Butch,” for example, features 20 stanzas, each of which is named for wood sculptures by Postminimalist artist Martin Puryear. The poem movingly explores identity and recounts Hayes’s experience of meeting Tyler: “Even if I knew this first meeting was our last, I would / have nothing to offer beyond the life I have made without him.”

A testament to Hayes’s eclecticism, other poems in Lighthead reflect on the life and work of soul singer Marvin Gaye and Modernist poet Wallace Stevens or reference songs by David Bowie and Douglas Adams’s 1979 science fiction classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In 2010 Lighthead won the National Book Award for poetry.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

In 2015 Hayes published How to Be Drawn, which also includes Pecha Kucha poems and experiments with traditional forms. The collection received a 2016 NAACP Image Award. Though Hayes’s early work never avoided politics, his next book, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), was directly spurred by the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November 2016. Containing 70 poems with the same title—that of the book itself—the collection addresses racism, police brutality, and white supremacy. In an interview with The Paris Review, Hayes explained,

The premise of [the book] was very simple—I’ve got to change my mind more than once for it to be an American sonnet. It has to have several turns, to have voltas all over it, because that’s what this country is like, zigzagging between insight and blindness, beauty and ugliness, joy and pain.…Once I started writing them, I couldn’t stop, because the Trump news just kept coming. There was such a lack of nuance, so much distraction. Every day was the same and not the same, so I gave all the sonnets titles that were the same and not the same, the way several people with the same name are not the same.

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin received a 2019 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, among other honors. Hayes’s seventh collection, So to Speak, was published in 2023.

Other works

Hayes’s other works include To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (2018), which is based on a series of lectures he gave about Knight, a poet of the Black Arts movement who began writing verse while incarcerated. Hayes is also the author of Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (2023), which features essays, prose poems, book reviews, and drawings. From 2017 to 2018 he served as poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine, and he has also edited poetry anthologies.

Personal life, teaching career, and honors

In 1997 Hayes married Yona Harvey, a fellow poet whom he met at Cave Canem. They had a daughter, Ua Pilar, and a son, Aaron Robert, before divorcing. Hayes taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), and other universities before joining the faculty of New York University as a creative writing professor.

Along with his literary awards, Hayes has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (2005), the Guggenheim Foundation (2009), and the MacArthur Foundation (2014). From 2017 to 2022 he was chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2022).