Terrance Hayes is an award-winning American poet and educator. He lives in New York City, where he is Distinguished Silver Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is the author of So to Speak, a collection of poems, and Watch Your Language, a collection of visual and lyric essays - twin volumes released by Penguin in 2023 that together explore the evolving dialogue between his poetry and poetics.

He has published six previous books of poems, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, winner of the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and finalist for both the National Book Award and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award.

His prose work, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight, received the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Among his honours are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship.