Building Community Through the Solarities Contemporary Poetry Series

Graduate students at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) are redefining poetry’s place in academic settings. Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto are building a deeply interdisciplinary, community-centered approach to poetry as co-conveners of the Contemporary Poetics Working Group (2023-2025). Its primary mode of engagement upends conventional lines separating academic study from artistic thought.

Bolsover and Cavuto wanted to combine the energy of experimental poetry with the intellectual attention given to scholarly research within the university, which led to the creation of the Contemporary Poetics Working Group in 2023.

Through book discussions, reading groups, and public programming centered around current poetic practices, the group supports doctoral students from various humanities disciplines as part of FHI’s Graduate Working Groups initiative. Their work cohered around Solarities, a public reading series organized in conjunction with the working group.

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Each semester, Solarities brought renowned poets, both established and emerging, to Duke. Writers like the late Alice Notley, Will Alexander, Roberto Tejada, and Stacy Szymaszek have appeared in the series alongside rising voices like Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola and fahima ife. 

Solarities 5, the Spring 2025 final reading in the series, featured Duke’s own Nathaniel Mackey, a poet who Bolsover and Cavuto have described as a guiding spirit for the entire project. 

To cultivate meaningful, reciprocal communication, each poet’s visit consists of a public reading and a seminar-style discussion with the working group. At the core of their curatorial approach, Bolsover and Cavuto strive to create intergenerational conversations among poets and readers that might not otherwise take place.

“We meet and discuss the poets’ work prior to their arrival, which makes for a really rich conversation,” Bolsover, a fourth-year English PhD student, explained. “It’s not just about reception, but about reading together with care and intention.” The structure encourages a kind of intellectual hospitality that combines formal analysis with artistic curiosity.

A key component of Bolsover and Cavuto’s individual academic trajectories is this blending. Both were published poets who came to Duke with years of cultural and artistic experience outside of conventional academic contexts. Bolsover came to Duke to study under Nathaniel Mackey, Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, and investigated the connections between experimental writing, multisensory experience, and ecological theory and poetic form.

“My dissertation uses a multisensory lens as a way to think about what poetry does,” Bolsover says, drawing from both her MFA training at Brown and her long-term collaboration with poet Susan Howe.

Cavuto, a fifth-year English doctoral student, shares a similar trajectory. After years of working in the creative scene in New York, he brought his interest in 20th-century poetics from all over the Americas to Duke. His current research particularly focuses on the Caribbean as a location for literary exchange and cultural analysis.

“We’re primarily poets—not academics in the conventional sense,” Cavuto said. “So, it was important to us to do a PhD with someone who’s also a creative practitioner. That’s why working with [Nathaniel] Mackey has been so important.”

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This ethos—valuing artists not just as creators but as thinkers—lies at the heart of their project. The working group and Solarities series together create an infrastructure where poetry is not simply studied but lived, debated, and performed as a vital mode of thought. In doing so, they are helping to dismantle what Cavuto calls “the artificial boundary between the artist as maker and the academic as thinker.”

Their dedication to inclusion and access is just as prominent. Many poets who are invited to participate in the Solarities series are not affiliated with universities. Bolsover and Cavuto say they hope to provide institutional resources to artists who are frequently shut out of such venues by honoring their work with the same critical attention and appreciation that a visiting scholar would receive. 

“Most of the poets we bring don’t have institutional affiliations,” Cavuto explained. “We wanted to make sure these resources were being redistributed to those who don’t normally have access to it.”

And this commitment to equity extends beyond Duke’s campus.

Readings are free, open to the public, and increasingly attended by community members from across the Triangle and beyond. “We’ve had people drive in from Atlanta, and even high school students travel two hours to attend,” Bolsover shared. “There’s clearly a hunger for this kind of engagement in the region.”

In addition to elevating poetry’s position within the university, the Contemporary Poetics Working Group is redefining what it means to be in community. By highlighting creative practice through literature and engaging interdisciplinary discourse, it aims to invite a wider audience.

Future readers, authors, and academics will be able to access the Solarities readings thanks to the group’s work  being preserved in the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound archive.

In the end, the project is not just an academic enterprise. “It’s a labor of love,” Cavuto said. “It’s nourished me in ways I didn’t expect,” Bolsover added. “Writing introductions, facilitating discussion, learning from the poets—it’s been one of the most important parts of my education at Duke.”