Jorie Graham — Killing Spree: Poems - with Jamie Raskin — at Conn Ave
About This Event
A new collection from the Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, whose “great body of work . . . has so much in it, more of life and of the world than that of almost any other poet now writing” (The New York Times).In a review of her first book, Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts (1980), The New York Times heralded Jorie Graham as a “poet of large ambitions and reckless music.” In the fifteen collections that followed, she has sought to remake the lyric’s ability to capture our recklessly disintegrating and accelerating daily realities. Now, in perhaps the most unflinching book of her long career, Graham explores how the human spirit, in the face of everything that threatens it, might navigate the rapids of extreme change. In these newly spare poems she enacts, with exquisite formal precision, how we might remain intact under conditions—ecological, political, technological—set to destroy what we've come to know as our world. Can we lose our humanity, these poems ask, Can it be taken from us, Will we surrender it without resistance? Extraordinary and haunting, Killing Spree reads like a survival manual guiding us deftly through the cataracts of a runaway climate, tipping-point violence, and out-of-control technology, into a terrain where a defiant, powerful imagination (and love) of the world reveals itself. Here is a poet truly at the height of her powers.Jorie Graham is the author of sixteen collections of poems. Her poetry has been widely translated and has been the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Pulitzer Prize, the Forward Prize (UK), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Nonino Prize, and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. She lives in Massachusetts and is Boylston Chair Emerita at Harvard University.Graham will be in conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes most of Montgomery County and a small part of Prince George's County. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fifth Term at the start of the 119th Congress on January 6, 2025. Rep. Raskin was chosen by the Democratic Caucus to be the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary in the 119th Congress. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, the highly-acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.This event is free with first come, first serve seating. To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
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Barbara Kingsolver — Partita — at Lisner
Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s kept at bay for a lifetime.Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.With razor-sharp acuity and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art.Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.
David Treuer — The Savage Mind: An American Legacy — at Conn Ave
A searing exploration of American violence, interweaving memoir, history, and reportage to reveal the wound at the heart of our nation—and to offer hope that the country, and we, might be healed.In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted is The Savage Mind, the most personal and powerful work of his storied literary career. How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both? Ranging from Treuer’s upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. The frontier, Treuer shows, was a site of epic, phantasmagoric bloodshed, initiated by white settlers but perpetuated by all of us. And after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish—quite the opposite. Today, Treuer explains, America’s frontier—and all its violent pathologies—has migrated overseas and into our hearts and minds. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament—one that Treuer makes visible in The Savage Mind, and which he offers hope for weaving, once and for all, into a better cloth.New York Times bestselling author David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at USC.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
Routes to a Nation: The Post Office in the Colonies and Early United States - A panel with Daniel A. Piazza, Lynn Heidelbaugh & Alison R. Bazylinski - moderated by Susan N. Smith — at Conn Ave
This richly illustrated volume evokes the early history of the US postal system with 130 new full-color images of artifacts and historical documents from the Smithsonian's National Postal MuseumTravel back to the postal system’s humble origins in colonial America with Routes to a Nation, which traces the development of the post from trans-Atlantic communication through the Revolutionary War and follows its growth as the nation expanded through the 18th and early 19th centuries. The story of the network's early days emerges from the 130 all-new high-quality photographs of letters, covers, seals, newspapers, stamps, and other artifacts, including many rarely seen archival images from the National Postal Museum's collections.From colonists resisting a postal network to the taxation debates of the early republic, the fledgling postal service was often entangled with its era’s hot-button political issues. This book illuminates the postal system’s role in the larger process of nation-building, as well as its impacts on the lives of the ordinary people who sent, received, and delivered the mail that fostered communication, facilitated trade, and connected communities.Mail carriers who completed the first postal routes across treacherous terrainFolded letters that offer first-hand accounts of 18th century lifeBen Franklin’s tumultuous decades as colonial deputy postmaster general, marked by administrative reform and political conflictMail that helped keep the patriot's military informed during the Revolutionary WarPolitics of the post in the early republic: freedom of expression in newspapers, debates in financing expansion, and handling diplomatic channelsRoutes to a Nation explores the personalities, controversies, and planning that shaped the continent-spanning postal system that has grown to provide service to more than 169 million addresses across every state, city, and town in the United States today.The SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM is located in the historic City Post Office Building, which was constructed in 1914 and served as the Washington, DC, post office from 1914 through 1986. It showcases the largest and most comprehensive collection of stamps and philatelic material in the world. DANIEL A. PIAZZA is the Chief Curator of Philately. LYNN HEIDELBAUGH is a curator specializing in the history of postal service in the U.S. ALISON R. BAZYLINSKI is a curator specializing in U.S. cultural history and material culture. SUSAN N. SMITH is the Museum's Winton M. Blount Research Chair. This panel will be moderated by SUSAN N. SMITH, the Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum and editor of Routes to a Nation: The Post Office in the Colonies and Early United States.Authors, also from the National Postal Museum, joining the panel are:DANIEL A. PIAZZA is the Chief Curator of Philately. LYNN HEIDELBAUGH is a curator specializing in the history of postal service in the U.S. ALISON R. BAZYLINSKI is a curator specializing in U.S. cultural history and material culture.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.