Lunch Poems, Berkeley’s storied noontime poetry series, is held in Morrison Library (inside Doe Library). The series is free and open to all audiences.
- All readings from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m.
- Event contact: poems-library@berkeley.edu
- Past readings are posted to YouTube
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Oct. 1, 2026
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of four books of poems — The Ground, Heaven, Living Weapon, and Silver — and two books of prose, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness and The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. A fifth collection, The Milky Way, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His honors include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for poetry, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, and an Arts and Letters Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the poetry editor of The New Republic and the editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. He also translates from Catalan. He is presidential professor and distinguished professor of English at Stony Brook University. He lives in New York and Barcelona.
Stephanie Young
Nov. 5, 2026
Stephanie Young is the author of five books of poetry and prose, including Pet Sounds, which received a Lambda Literary Award; Ursula or University; and It’s No Good Everything’s Bad. Her latest book, Crowd Control: The Racial Ordering of Literary Reward, written with Claire Grossman and Juliana Spahr, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Her scholarly writing has appeared in American Literary History, ASAP/J, Public Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. Young is an editor at Krupskaya Books and co-curated Poetics and Plant Medicine, a 2026 reading and conversation series supported by the Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship program at UC Berkeley. Young directs the creative writing program at Mills College at Northeastern University.
Sara Nicholson
Dec. 3, 2026
Sara Nicholson is the author of three books of poems, most recently April, all published by The Song Cave. Her work has appeared in Common Place Poetics, Little Mirror, and elsewhere. She was the 2018 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley and now teaches in the M.F.A. program at Boise State University. She lives in Boise, Idaho.
Bianca Stone
Feb. 4, 2027
Bianca Stone is the author of four collections of poetry. Her three most recent, all from Tin House Books, are The Near and Distant World (2026); What Is Otherwise Infinite (2022), winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award; and The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (2018). Her work has appeared widely in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. She is a visiting lecturer in poetry at Dartmouth College and teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House in Goshen, Vermont, where she hosts the Ode & Psyche Podcast. Stone is currently serving as the poet laureate of Vermont (2024-28).
Zeina Hashem Beck
April 1, 2027
Zeina Hashem Beck is the author of This Was Supposed to Be About Beauty, a collection of mirror sonnets forthcoming from Penguin Books in March 2027. She is the winner of the 2023 Arab American Book Award for poetry for O, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. Her debut nonfiction book, Sublingual: Failing in an Other’s Language, is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in fall 2027. She is also the author of Louder than Hearts and To Live in Autumn, as well as the chapbooks 3arabi Song and There Was and How Much There Was. Her work has appeared on the website of the Academy of American Poets and in Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Nation, Poetry, and elsewhere. She grew up in Lebanon and currently resides in the Bay Area.
Beth Piatote
May 6, 2027
Beth Piatote is a Nez Perce writer, scholar, and playwright and an associate professor of English and comparative literature at UC Berkeley. She specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to Native American literature; creative writing; Nez Perce language and literature; and Indigenous language revitalization more broadly. Piatote is the author of three books and two plays. Her most recent publication is distant water: poems, from Milkweed Editions in 2026. The collection explores the way Nez Perce language embodies the inseparable connection of land, sound, and spirit. Her poems, scholarly essays, and short stories have appeared in Poetry, World Literature Today, PMLA, The Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere.
If you require accommodations to participate in this event, please contact Coordinator Violet Spurlock at poems-library@berkeley.edu or 619-708-2181 at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.
The Lunch Poems series, founded by Professor Robert Hass, is supported by Dr. and Mrs. Tom Colby, the UC Berkeley Library, the Morrison Library Fund, the UC Berkeley English Department, and the Deans’ Office of the College of Letters & Science. For more information or to be added to the Lunch Poems mailing list, please email poems-library@berkeley.edu or follow @PoemsLunch on Instagram and X.