Pitt’s Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) will feature poets Terrance Hayes and Rickey Laurentiis at a reading and discussion at Heinz Chapel on Thursday, Jan. 24, at 7 p.m.

The inaugural fellow in creative writing at CAAPP, Laurentiis also serves on the executive board for the Black Art Futures Fund. In 2014, Laurentiis’ “Boy with Thorn” collection was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press and selected for the Cave Canem poetry prize by Hayes, who called it “an extraordinary, and ultimately, irreducible debut.”

Hayes co-founded CAAPP in 2016 with Dawn Lundy Martin. A 2014 MacArthur Fellow, Hayes received his MFA in poetry from Pitt and was a professor of English here becoming an English professor at New York University. His collection “Lighthead” won the National Book Award in 2010.