Dora Malech: "Trying x Trying" & Jeannie Vanasco: "A Silent Treatment"

Join us for a reading and conversation with poet Dora Malech and memoirist Jeannie Vanasco.

About Trying x Trying:

In Trying × Trying, Dora Malech dissects the language of our times; she turns over the familiar phrases of politics, parenthood, and pandemic to reveal what lies beneath. Through playing with the double meaning of “trying” as both perseverance and reproductive struggle, these poems navigate public and private spheres and interrogate the words we use to make sense of uncertainty and belief.

With sharp lyricism and restless energy, Malech transforms language into prayer and protest. Sound bends, meanings shift, and repetition becomes a revelation as she traces the tensions between individual and collective experience. Trying × Trying is an enlightening meditation on persistence, reminding us that even in fractured times, poetry finds a way forward.

About A Silent Treatment:

Jeannie Vanasco’s mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie’s home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother’s childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and — in big and small ways — succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again.

From the acclaimed author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I was a Girl and The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment is a searingly honest and lasting testament to the power of all things left unsaid.

About the Authors:

Dora Malech's newest book of poetry, Trying × Trying, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in October 2025. Previous books of poetry include Flourish, Stet, Say So, and Shore Ordered Ocean; her poems appear in publications that include The New Yorker and Best American Poetry. She is coeditor of The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, cotranslator of Dolore Minimo by Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, and recipient of honors that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she is chair of the Writing Seminars and editor in chief of The Hopkins Review. Photo of Dora Malech credit Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University.Learn more about Dora Malech.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl — which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others — and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, will be published by Tin House in September 2025. She lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

Learn more about Jeannie Vanasco.

About the Program:

• Doors will open to registered attendees at 2:00 pm.
• A local bookseller will be on-site and have books available for purchase.
• Free parking vouchers are available to program attendees who park at the Franklin Street Garage (15 W. Franklin Street). Ask Pratt event staff for your parking voucher prior to or after the program.
• There is no registration required for virtual attendance. Simply visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library's Facebook or YouTube page.

Host or Publisher Enoch Pratt Free Library