Join 2022-23 Visiting Fellow Adrienne Raphel and poet Megan Fernandes for a special evening dedicated to poetry. Celebrated as two of the most exciting poets of their generation, both Raphel and Fernandes experiment across form, language, and sound to generate fragmented, fleeting images of the current moment. From Fernandes’ transposition of poetry’s most traditional subject–love–to contemporary urban wastelands to Raphel’s adoption of the paranoid, compulsive registers of the Internet, the two diagnose cultural maladies of contemporary society and play with poetry as a means of reconciliation. They will discuss the uses, abuses, and varied appearances of poetry in a frantic world.
About the speakers:
Adrienne Raphel is a 2022-23 American Library in Paris Visiting Fellow. She is the author of Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review; What Was It For, winner of the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize; and Our Dark Academia, forthcoming this fall. Her writing appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and many other publications. She has been a featured speaker at events such as the National Book Festival at the Library of Congress, and she serves as a mentor with the Periplus collective. Raphel holds a PhD from Harvard, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Princeton.
Megan Fernandes is a writer living in New York City. Fernandes has published in the New Yorker, POETRY, the Kenyon Review, the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, among others. Her book, Good Boys, was published with Tin House Books in 2020. Her forthcoming collection, I Do Everything I’m Told, will also be published by Tin House in summer 2023. Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and the Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College where she teaches courses on poetry, environmental writing, and critical theory. She is a former Yaddo fellow, holds a PhD in English from the University of California, and an MFA in poetry from Boston University.
Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Raphel and Fernandes will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.
This event requires advance registration.
Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.
