Beck Series: Poet Jesse Nathan and Novelist DK Nnuro

The Beck Series welcomes GLCA Prize winners for poetry, Jesse Nathan, and for fiction DK Nnuro. 

Nathan is the winner of the 2024 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Poetry. Raised in northern California and rural Kansas, Nathan’s first book of poems, “Eggtooth,” was published in 2023. His poetry has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, The Believer, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. He has taught poetry in the Kenyon Review Online Workshops and online at the 92Y, and currently teaches in the English Department at UC Berkeley. 

Ghanaian-born author Nnuro is the winner of the 2024 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in Fiction. His novel, “What Napoleon Could Not Do” (2023), was one of Barack Obama’s 2023 Summer Reading List picks. The book was also shortlisted for The New American Voices Award and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A graduate of Johns Hopkins and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Nnuro is currently curator of special projects at the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art and an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Iowa English Department.