The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
invites you to a reading and conversation with
Elizabeth Spires
Thursday, May 9, 2019
7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
The Culture Center
410 Columbus Avenue
(Between West 79th & West 80th Streets)
New York, NY 10024
Doors open at 6:15 pm | Reading begins at 7:00 pm
~ Refreshments before & after ~
Elizabeth Spires will read from her recent collection, A Memory of the Future,
and other new poems. A conversation will follow her reading.
Elizabeth Spires’s latest poetry collection, A Memory of the Future, published by W.W. Norton, was included in The New York Times’s Best Poetry of 2018 list. Zen-inspired, the book considers who or what is the self, meditating on the divide between the social persona who navigates the world, and the artist’s secret self, driven to create, paint, write. “Who writes these words that follow me/here, there, like unfamiliar footprints? Who?” Spires asks, answering “….If I am anything, I am only Sage of the Dust,/ Scholar of the Small, Historian of the Drifting Clouds.” Her other books include Globe, Swan’s Island, Annonciade, Worldling, Now the Green Blade Rises, and The Wave-Maker. Her poems have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, American Scholar, Poetry, APR, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, Paris Review, andThe New Yorker. In 2011-12, her interest in Japanese artists’ books led to a fellowship at the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library; she has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award, and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books for children include The Mouse of Amherst, the tale of a literary friendship between a white mouse and Emily Dickinson, and I Heard God Talking to Me, about the celebrated African-American stone carver William Edmondson. Elizabeth Spires holds a Chair for Distinguished Achievement at Goucher College in Baltimore, where she has lived since 1978.