Vijay Seshadri

On September 30, 2025 Seshadri performed at POWERHOUSE Arena for “Seriously Celebrating The New Yorker’s 100th Anniversary: Poetry.”

Seshadri’s poetry is marked by a willingness to press language against the limits of memory, history, and personal experience. His poems balance wit and gravity, compassion and remorseless clarity, moving between the intimate and the cosmic in search of what he calls “the emotional reality … that makes the poem a poem.”²

Born in Bangalore and raised in Ohio, Seshadri has become one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American poetry. He has authored five collections of poetry, including The Long Meadow, which won the James Laughlin Award, 3 Sections, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and That Was Now, This Is Then. A former editor at The New Yorker, he now teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Purchase A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925–2025 via our virtual storefront on Bookshop.org, the bookselling platform that supports independent bookstores. A portion of proceeds from all book purchases will go toward helping support SpeakEasy’s nonprofit mission and our literary programs on stage, in schools, and on the road with The SpeakEasy Bookmobile.

² “This Was Then, That Was Now: An Interview with Poet Vijay Seshadri,” Green Mountain Review