(BRANCHBURG, NJ) -- The Department of English at Raritan Valley Community College will present award-winning poet Terrance Hayes, April 6, at noon, in the Nash Theatre at the College’s Branchburg campus. The event, which is free of charge and open to the public, will include a reading, book-signing, and question-and-answer session with the audience.

Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series; and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.

A Professor of English at New York University, Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation.

According to the MacArthur Foundation, “Terrance Hayes is a poet who reflects on race, gender, and family in works marked by formal dexterity and a reverence for history and the artistry of crafting verse. Employing an almost improvisational approach to writing, Hayes conjoins fluid, often humorous wordplay with references to popular culture both past and present in his subversion of canonical poetic forms.”

Writer Cornelius Eady has said of Hayes: “First you’ll marvel at his skill, his near-perfect pitch, his disarming humor, his brilliant turns of phrase. Then you’ll notice the grace, the tenderness, the unblinking truth-telling just beneath his lines, the open and generous way he takes in our world.”

No advance registration is required for the RVCC event.

Raritan Valley Community College (RVCC) is located at 118 Lamington Road in Branchburg, New Jersey.