Jennifer Egan, Damon Galgut, Maggie Siff And More Announced for 92Y's New Literary Season
Season also features Hilary Mantel, Andre Holland, Maxine Hong Kingston, Solmaz Sharif, John Douglas Thompson, Tessa Hadley and more.
By: A.A. Cristi Jan. 26, 2022
The 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center's Winter/Spring season features readings by best-selling and prize-winning novelists, acclaimed poets, tributes to Shakespeare, Lucille Clifton and Toni Morrison - and a dramatic reading of Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay," among other programs.
Popular British author Tessa Hadley kicks off the season on February 15 with her new book, Free Love, and later in the season Jennifer Egan and Damon Galgut will read from new novels - hers is the highly-anticipated The Candy House, his is the Booker Prize winner The Promise. Well-known actors will take center stage, as well. André Holland, Chukwudi Iwuji and John Douglas Thompson will read and discuss Othello in March; Maggie Siff will bring Carson's beloved poem to life in May - and Eisa Davis will channel Lucille Clifton. Online events include Maxine Hong Kingston and Hilary Mantel - and mesmerizing poet Alice Oswald, among others. The Poetry Center's complete Winter/Spring lineup is detailed below; it's also available at www.92y.org/poetry. For all events detailed below, $15 tickets are available for ages 40 and under - via 92Y's XYZ program (registration is required).tessa hadley: free love
with Colm Toibin
Online Event
Tuesday, February 15, 7:30 pm, $20 (Pre-recorded event)
She was pleased with her life. The year was 1967. Tessa Hadley discusses her new novel, Free Love, about a woman's intellectual and sexual awakening in 1960s London, with Colm Tóibín. "Free Love is beautifully structured and brilliantly paced. It displays Tessa Hadley's extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive," wrote Tóibín.
playing othello
with Andre Holland, Chukwudi Iwuji and John Douglas Thompson
In Person and Online
Monday, March 7, 7:30 pm, From $22 in person/$20 online
That's he that was Othello. Here I am. Three acclaimed actors who have recently starred as Shakespeare's Othello-André Holland (at Shakespeare's Globe), Chukwudi Iwuji (at The Public Theater) and John Douglas Thompson (at Theatre for a New Audience)-discuss the challenges they faced in playing the role and read key speeches from the play. Their conversation will be moderated by James Shapiro and Ayanna Thompson, Shakespeare Scholars in Residence at The Public Theater. The evening will open with a musical selection from Duke Ellington's 1957 tribute to Shakespeare, Such Sweet Thunder.
damon galgut: the promise
Online
Wednesday, March 16, 7:30 PM, From $20
But when the words are said to her aloud, she doesn't believe them. She closes her eyes and shakes her head. No, no. It can't be true...Damon Galgut, in his first 92Y appearance, discusses his latest novel, The Promise , winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. "This remarkable new novel suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge," wrote James Wood. "It most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner."
erica hunt and solmaz sharif
Online
Monday, March 28, 7:30 PM, $15
Erica Hunt's latest book of poetry is Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems-"an invaluable gathering of the pioneering poet's oeuvre, and a treasure of lyric and analytic revelations and delights," wrote John Keene. "Hunt expands poetry's range and power and shows how to make the illegible legible." Solmaz Sharif's new collection is Customs . "Solmaz Sharif's poems marry an exquisite lyric sensibility to a profound social conscience, and in so doing they urge a renewed sensitivity to the private costs of public conflict," wrote Tracy K. Smith. "They are also beautifully and inventively crafted, never letting readers forget that what is at stake begins in language."
toni morrison's the black book
A talk by saidiya hartman
In Person and Online
Thursday, March 31, 7:30 PM, $35
As the final event in 92Y's year-long series on the works of Toni Morrison, scholar Saidiya Hartman (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments) discusses a work that Morrison co-edited, The Black Book, a landmark compendium of words and images documenting the Black experience in America. "The Black Book is an incredible testament to the strength, character, and endurance of a people," wrote Cornel West. "Especially in these historic times, I can think of no better way to celebrate African American achievement than through a retrospective look at our history-painful and pleasurable. This is a book no American-black or white-can afford to ignore." Purchase $15 tickets to this event by signing up for XYZ when you check out.
kaveh akbar and john murillo
In Person and Online
Monday, April 11, 7:30 PM, $15
Kaveh Akbar's latest collection of poems is Pilgrim Bell. "It is a marvel," wrote Mary Karr. "Like his previous work, it dazzles us. Akbar is incapable of setting down a line that's less than luminous. Pilgrim Bell is destined to become a classic, another blazing torch added to the eternal flames." John Murillo's latest book is Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry . "This stunning new collection speaks hard truths about the violence that afflicts our communities, our bodies, and our stories," wrote Rigoberto González.
alice oswald: gigantic cinema
Online
Thursday, April 25, 7:30 PM, $20
After all, what is not weather? Alice Oswald-Oxford University Professor of Poetry and author of Memorial and Falling Awake, among other books of poems-reads from and discusses Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology , which she co-edited with Paul Keegan and which features contributions ranging from Homer's winds and Ovid's flood to Frank O'Hara's sun and Elizabeth Bishop's "Song for a Rainy Season."
"Our ruling idea was to have no ideas: to dispense with writing 'about' weather, writing that knows what it's talking about," Oswald and Keegan wrote in their preface to the anthology. "Instead, we have preferred writing that is 'like' weather, that has the sovereignty of sheer event. As if the weather were to write itself. To concentrate on something as erratic as the weather has an immediate and disturbing effect on the imagination."jennifer egan and don lee
Online Event
Thursday, May 5, 7:30 pm, From $22 in person/$20 online
Jennifer Egan's new novel is The Candy House, a "sibling" novel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad. "Twisting through myriad points of view, narrative styles, and divergent voices, Egan proves herself as perceptive an interpreter of the necessity of human connection as ever, and her vision is as irresistible as the tech she describes," wrote Publishers Weekly. Don Lee's new book of stories is The Partition . "It is flat-out brilliant: a witty, kaleidoscopic tear through questions of race and identity in America today by a writer who has wrought luminous fiction from these issues for years," wrote Jennifer Egan. "Don Lee's collection offers vivid, entertaining proof that ethnicity is never straightforward or easy-no matter who we are, or where we stand."
lucille clifton's generations:
A reading by Eisa Davis
with tracy k. smith
Series Title | Event Title
Monday, May 9, 7:30 pm, From $22 in person/$20 online
Who remembers the names of slaves? Only the children of slaves. Acclaimed actor, playwright and musical performer Eisa Davis (Bulrusher, Angela's Mixtape, Passing Strange) reads from Lucille Clifton's classic family memoir, Generations, upon its re-release by New York Review Books. Davis's reading will be followed by a conversation with Tracy K. Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate and the author of Such Color: New and Selected Poems.
Originally published in 1976, Generations is a powerful work of prose by a great American poet. "Lucille Clifton uses the occasion of her father's funeral to attest to the lives lived and the marks made by the generations of people she descends from. First they are names, dates, and places," writes Tracy K. Smith, in her introduction to the new edition. "Once named, these kin arrive not singly, but en masse, brought to life through the rhythm and inflection of voices. Clifton has teased out these lives, allowing them to demand their rightful place, to command our full attention, to teach us things about themselves and ourselves."Anne Carson's the Glass Essay
a reading by Maggie Siff
In Person and Online
Thursday, May 12, 7:30 PM, From $22 in person/$20 online
Whenever I visit my mother / I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, / my lonely life around me like a moor... Acclaimed actor Maggie Siff (Billions) performs a reading of Anne Carson's classic poem, "The Glass Essay."
"Read 'The Glass Essay'-a poem richer than most novels nowadays. See how in its utter clarity of narration it weaves and conflates one theme with another, how it works in the Brontës as daimons to preside over the poem and to haunt it, how it tells two strong stories with Tolstoyan skill," wrote Guy Davenport. "This is a boldly new kind of poem. Anne Carson's powers of invention are apparently infinite."Discovery poetry contest:
winners' reading
In Person and Online
Thursday, May 19, 7:30 pm, Free
92Y's 70 plus year-old Discovery Poetry Contest recognizes the work of poets who have not yet published a book. This reading features the four poets who won the 2022 contest. The contest has long recognized the exceptional work of poets who have not yet published a book. Many of these writers-John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Lucille Clifton, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Mary Jo Bang, and Solmaz Sharif, among others-have gone on to become leading voices of their generations.
Maxine Hong Kingston
Online
Monday, June 13, 7:30 pm, $20
"You must not tell anyone,"my mother said, "what I am about to tell you."
A wide-ranging conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston upon the publication of her books-The Woman Warrior, Tripmaster Monkey, and others-in a Library of America edition. "Kingston transcends her personal experiences, tapping collective memory, to fashion an encompassing vision of Chinese-American experience spanning past and present," wrote Xiaolu Guo. "Such an imaginative storyteller could only be the product of a rich oral tradition, a tradition rooted in a landscape whose soil has been mixed with the sweat and toil of generations of the same family, and whose ancestral stories have been repeatedly told."
Hilary Mantel:
Learning TO TALK
Online
Tuesday, June 21, 7:30 PM, $20
I cannot get out of my mind, now, the village where I was born, just out of the curl of the city's tentacles. In the wake of the publication of her award-winning Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel discusses the re-release of Learning to Talk , a classic collection of loosely autobiographical stories that reveal the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. "It is in sparkling writing such as this that the truth is told," wrote Penelope Lively. "These stories are a maverick vision of growing up acute and disenchanted in the north in the mid-20th century."
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