On a Thursday evening in mid-October, the galleries of Auburn University's art museum will trade their usual quiet for the sound of poetry. A. Van Jordan, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art's poet-in-residence, will read at the museum on October 15, 2026, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., joined by the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize and the first-ever winner of The Jule Museum Award for Creative Writing. The event is free and open to the public, a deliberate nod to Arts & Humanities Month and to the museum's role as a gathering place rather than a vault.
The evening brings together three distinct strands of writing, each with its own history. Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry, including Rise, which won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, which The London Times named one of the best books of 2005; Quantum Lyrics; The Cineaste; and, most recently, When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again, which won the 2024 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Poetry. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Pushcart Prize, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He currently holds the Humanities and Sciences Chair in English at Stanford University, where he is also part of the inaugural faculty of the Department of African & African American Studies. Before Stanford, he was the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan.
Jordan's work is hard to pin to a single subject, which is part of its appeal. He writes about film, music, race, history, and popular culture, often letting one bleed into another. The Cineaste, for instance, is a book-length engagement with the movies, revisiting films such as Nosferatu, The Homesteader, Run Lola Run, and Oldboy through the eyes of both the viewer and the characters on screen. The poet Terrance Hayes described it as an act of empathy: "With an imagination illuminated by empathy, Jordan inhabits the eye of the camera, the eye of the actor, and the 'I' of a viewer tethered to image and history. These terrific poems give shape to lives made of light." M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A reaches back to 1936, when thirteen-year-old MacNolia Cox of Akron, Ohio, became the first African American to reach the final round of the national spelling bee, only to be undone, it is widely believed, by a word the Southern judges pulled from outside the official list. Jordan, who was born in Akron in 1965, grew up in the city where that story happened.
The second voice on the program belongs to the winner of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, an annual award administered by Southern Humanities Review. The prize grants $1,000 and publication in the journal for a single "poem of witness," and it is named for Jake Adam York, a poet who died unexpectedly in Denver on December 16, 2012, at the age of forty. York was a fifth-generation Alabamian, born in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1972 and raised in Gadsden, Alabama. He earned his undergraduate degree at Auburn before going on to an MFA and a PhD at Cornell. His collections included Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings, which won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry, and Persons Unknown, published after his death. Much of his writing circled the violence of the civil rights era in the South, an effort to remember people and events that others preferred to let fade. He was also, by all accounts, a generous teacher and editor. The prize that carries his name is presented each October by the Jule Museum, and the format is intimate: the recipient and the judge appear together in conversation at the museum, and the winner's travel to Auburn is covered. Jordan serves as the 2026 judge, which is how he comes to share the stage with this year's honoree.
The third strand is new. The Jule Museum Award for Creative Writing is making its debut this year, and it recognizes an undergraduate whose writing responds to a specific object in the museum's collection. That premise is the whole point of the evening: a poem or a story that begins with a painting, a sculpture, or a print and then travels somewhere the object alone could not go. Support for the award comes from Michael and Pat Williams and from John and Michelle Mason.
There is a certain logic to holding all of this inside the Jule. The museum opened on October 3, 2003, and is the only university art museum in Alabama; it holds accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums, first granted in 2013 and renewed in 2022. Its six galleries occupy roughly 40,000 square feet, alongside a 127-seat auditorium, a café, and a gift shop, with ten acres of grounds that include a lake, a walking path, and outdoor sculpture. The building exists because of a wedding anniversary. In early 1998, Albert Smith, a 1947 Auburn graduate, pledged $3 million toward the project as a gift to his wife, Jule Collins Smith, marking fifty years of marriage. The university's board of trustees responded by naming the museum for her.
The collection itself has an origin story that suits a place devoted to witness. Its foundation is the Advancing American Art collection, assembled in 1946 by the U.S. Department of State as a Cold War cultural initiative meant to showcase American modernism abroad and, in the process, advertise the freedom of expression that a democracy allows. Within a year the program was shut down amid partisan criticism over spending taxpayer money on abstract and expressionistic work. In 1948, Frank Applebee, then head of Auburn's art department, bought paintings from the auction, acquiring pieces by Arthur Dove, Lyonel Feininger, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ben Shahn, among others. For nearly sixty years that collection had no permanent home for public viewing. It finally got one when the Jule opened in 2003. A historical marker on the grounds notes that the collection also stands as a reminder of the ongoing argument over the government's role in supporting art, a debate that has not exactly been settled.
So the October 15 program sets a poet who writes about film and memory beside a prize built to keep a dead Alabama poet's concerns alive, and beside a student just beginning to make the same kind of leap from looking to writing. Jordan's presence as poet-in-residence is itself a statement about how the museum wants to use its rooms: not only as a place to display objects but as a place where people talk back to them. The event runs one hour, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., at 901 South College Street. Admission is free, and no ticket is required. For anyone in Auburn who has wondered what a museum does after the galleries close, the answer on this particular Thursday is that it fills with voices.