3rd Thurs: Jennifer Barber/Lisa Sewell/Elaine Sexton/Elizabeth Murphy

Jennifer Barber served as poet laureate of Brookline, MA, from 2021 to spring of 2025 and she is a previous board member for Grid Books. Her most recent book of poems isThe Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made(2022); her next collection will appear in 2026. She co-edited the anthologyTree Lines: 21stCentury Poemswith Jessica Greenbaum and Fred Marchant. She is the current series editor of the Tenth Gate Prize at The Word Works.

Lisa Sewell is the author ofThe Way Out,Name Withheld,Impossible Object, andBirds of North America, an artist’s book collaboration with Susan Hagen and Nathalie Anderson. She has edited several essay collections for Wesleyan University Press that focus on twenty-first century North American poetry and poetics, includingNorth American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Beyond Lyric and Language, with Kazim Ali, andAmerican Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, with Claudia Rankine. She has received grants and awards from the Leeway Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, and has held residencies at the Virginia Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Tyrone Guthrie Center and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, among others. She teaches in the English Department at Villanova University and divides her time between Philadelphia and White Salmon, WA.

Elaine Sexton is a maker, critic, teacher, and micro-publisher. Site Specific: New & Selected Poems is her fifth collection of poetry. Her poems are widely anthologized and published in journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and O! the Oprah Magazine. She is the author of the libretto for The Post Office, a chamber opera in poems, in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky, commissioned by Queen City Opera and developed by Opera Fusion: New Works/Cincinnati Opera. She lives in New York and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. elainesexton.org

Elizabeth Murphy is the director and publisher of Grid Books and its imprint Off the Grid Press. Her edition of literary correspondence of American poet Donald Justice and novelist Richard Stern, A Critical Friendship, was published in 2013 by University of Nebraska Press. A collection of her poems, in the form of an exchange with the late poet Taylor Stoehr, was published in 2018 by Pressed Wafer.

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EVENT ACCESSIBILITY

This event will take place at street level. If possible, the event will be livestreamed to YouTube. ASL interpretation may be provided (based on the availability of interpreters) but must be requested at least 2 weeks in advance of the event. Seats are limited. Please email us at [email protected] as soon as possible if you require ASL interpretation, guaranteed seating, or other accommodations. We will do our best to serve your needs!

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