*Covid-19 Update: Although our physical space has temporarily closed, the Library will continue with its Evening with an Author programming during the period of confinement. Our events will continue to be free and open to the public, via Zoom (please RSVP here to receive meeting details and password). We have moved the events up, to begin at 17h00 (Central European Time). Please check eLibris or our programs calendar for updates and line-up.

Join us for an evening of reading and discussion with poet and essayist Traci Brimhall. We will hear Traci read from her new essay “The Grief Artist” about the role of creativity and grief, as well as discuss the work she is doing now researching creativity in epidemics. She lives 20 miles from the source of the 1918 flu outbreak and is looking at both the art produced at that time, as well as what it means to grieve long distance. An audience Q&A will follow.

In “The Grief Artist,” Traci braids several narratives that explore the relationship of the creative process to the grief processes of both death and divorce. She traces lost love letters she finds in a used book and ties them to the end of her marriage; examines the year she spent making hospice blankets after her mother’s death; and interviews a woman who used flowers from her mother’s funeral to make art for 100 days. In each of these Traci asks how art can help us grieve in a culture that no longer has public bereavement rituals and how the creative process can possibly even help us with the physical aspects of grief.

Traci Brimhall is the author of four books: Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon); Saudade (Copper Canyon); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Brevity, and cited as notable in several editions of Best American Essays.  She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts.  She’s the Director of Creative Writing at Kansas State University and lives in Manhattan, KS.