Humanities in the Village, ft. Dora Malech, TRYING X TRYING

Presenting Humanities in the Village, an event series in partnership with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible.

For this January edition-- the first of 2026-- we are thrilled to welcome Dora Malech in celebration of her new poetry collection TRYING X TRYING, out this year from Carnegie-Mellon University Press. In this collection, 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.

Whether it's your first time at the series or you've been attending for years, we hope you'll join us to usher this exciting new book into the world!

Order TRYING X TRYING here.

Dora Malech’s most recent book of poetry is Flourish, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, which will publish her next book of poetry, Trying × Trying, in 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry London, and The Best American Poetry, and her honors include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, where she is an associate professor in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.

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