UC Berkeley English extends a warm welcome to Cecily Nicholson as the 2025 Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry.
Cecily Nicholson has worked for years in museum and arts education and is a long-time volunteer with Emma’s Acres, an agricultural social enterprise and restorative justice program led by community impacted by carcerality and food insecurity. Nicholson is the author of five poetry books and past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and a Governor General’s Literary Award. Her most recent work, Crowd Source, considers the diurnal movement of crows. She is an assistant professor in the School of Creative Writing at UBC and the current Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at UC Berkeley.
The Holloway Poetry Series is sponsored by the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and is funded through an Endowment made by Roberta C. Holloway in 1981. This generous fund has enabled us to establish a tradition of poetry on campus to celebrate the works of renowned and rising contemporary poets, and provide an opportunity for graduate student poets from the UC Berkeley campus community to introduce and read alongside a featured poet. The Spring 2025 Faculty Curator is Professor Solmaz Sharif.
Each academic year the Holloway Series honors one distinguished poet with a residency at the University of California, Berkeley, formally known as the Holloway Lectureship in the Practice of Poetry. Residents teach a semester-long creative writing workshop and give a featured reading in the Holloway Series.