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Poet’s Visit Inspires English Students

1/14/2026

Award-winning poet and educator Iain Haley Pollock was the ideal guest for Darren Wood’s English 12 Seminars class, Just Poetry: A Workshop on Poetry and Justice.

Pollock’s combination of creative talent and teaching experience brought the students’ studies to life.

Wood, who organizes the annual Westchester Poetry Festival on campus, first met Pollock, director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University, when Pollock was invited to read at the festival. Pollock is the author of the poetry collections “Spit Back a Boy,” “Ghost, Like a Place” and “All the Possible Bodies.”

“To be able to talk to a published and professional poet about craft and how an expert practitioner of poetry writing goes about writing poems was, in part, the goal,” Wood explained. “A lot of his poems address issues of justice, equity and historical justice, from personal experience, and they are also very conscious of national history and justice.”

Anabelle Mount ’26 said, “I found his relationship with his grandfather interesting; family is a recurring theme in his poetry."

The students read a number of Pollock’s poems before his visit. One in particular, “Deep Down, Every Sinner,” was inspired by the “Erased Lynchings” series by interdisciplinary artist Ken Gonzales-Day that uses altered historical photographs to reveal how absence can speak volumes about violence and memory.

“We looked at a bunch of Gonzales-Day’s images as we worked on erasure poems, which are poems that take away elements of an existing text, and what they leave behind is really interesting,” Wood said.

According to Wood, Pollock’s visit made a lasting impression: “The students have a chance to see the poem as produced by this living, breathing, embodied person in class and even ask specific questions, so it makes the process of creating the poems very material and real to them.”

Mount agreed, “Watching Mr. Pollock express raw emotions while reading his work makes the poem come alive in a new way. It's a lot more moving than just hearing about a person, and he was really good with eye contact — that's something that can influence how you feel.”