Diane Seuss & Jane Huffman: Poetry & Conversation (via Zoom)

Please join us on Zoom for an evening of poetry and conversation with Diane Seuss and Jane Huffman! Sunday, March 10, 4 PM ET.

Diane Seuss is the author of six books of poetry: Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2024); frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), a recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (New Issues Press, 1998). A Guggenheim fellow, Seuss was writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College for many years, and has been a visiting professor at Colorado College, the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and Washington University in St. Louis. In 2021, she received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2023, Seuss served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series. She lives in Michigan.

In poems of rangy curiosity, sharp humor, and illuminating self-scrutiny, Seuss’s Modern Poetry investigates our time’s deep isolation and divisiveness and asks: What can poetry be now? Do poems still have the capacity to mean? “It seems wrong / to curl now within the confines / of a poem,” Seuss writes. “You can’t hide / from what you made / inside what you made.” What she finds there, finally, is a surprising but unmistakable love.

Jane Huffman’s debut poetry collection, Public Abstract, was the winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman first book prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere, and she was the recipient of a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Jane has her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Denver. She is founder and editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal.

Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Jane Huffman’s intricate debut collection, Public Abstract, examines illness and recovery, loss and addiction: the ripples of influence an addict has on their family circle, and vice versa. We watch as a private mind, devoted to its privacy, is laid out on the page and abstracted to become a public revelation. Building an aesthetic of compressed interiority, the speaker’s tension is clear–“From one lung, I tell the truth. / From the other lung, I lie.” Through intimate and meticulous poems, Public Abstract explores the operations of form, sewn together, and the failings of form, ripped apart. Crumbling under its own weight and folderol, form becomes an act of invention and in Huffman’s expert hands, revision becomes a genre.