Two books, authored by J. Chester Johnson and published during 2017, will be featured at this Poets House event.

Auden, the Psalms, and Me tells the story, with many personal vignettes, of the retranslation of the psalms now included in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, for which Johnson and W. H. Auden were the two poets on the drafting committee. This retranslation has become a standard.

This special event will be open to the public, but you must be a current Poets House Member to read.

To become a Poets House Member or renew your membership, click here.

To sign-up to read at this event, please e-mail gina@poetshouse.org. Readers will be listed in an upcoming e-blast and here on our website. Space is limited. First come, first served.

Winter Tangerine is holding two sessions of a four-day intensive writing workshop at Poets House. We design our workshops for writers who want to challenge themselves and their work. We won't teach you how to write: instead, we want to collectively build new lenses meant to create dynamic readings and writings. As a student, you'll engage in daily writing activities, lesson-based writing prompts, & group discussions led by a team of enthusiastic advisors.

Poetry is a vital part of Saudi culture celebrated through popular poetry festivals and in regional televised poetry competitions where Saudi poets excel. Drawing from this rich tradition is Abdulatif Yousef, a renowned Saudi-born poet known for dazzling audiences across the Gulf with his multimedia-rich poetry readings.

The Envy of the World is a series of collaborations and conversations focused on the theme of black male kinship. It is centrally concerned with how black men and boys understand themselves in relationship not only to one another, but to the myriad forms of institutional violence that circumscribe their being and becoming.

Between July 18 to July 23, poet CAConrad will be in the Prismatic Park to build personalized (Soma)tic poetry rituals, free and open to the public. He will also have daily talks on the occult and the (Soma)tic practice; please see schedule below.

The Ghazal is a form whose aesthetics allow it to make a grand gesture in merely two lines. How does a successful Ghazal string these “independent, epigrammatic” couplets without sounding archaic or sentimental? In this workshop, we’ll take a brief look at the rich tradition of the Ghazal in Urdu, and explore some well-crafted Ghazals by contemporary American poets. Workshop participants will engage in writing exercises and discussion on their way to writing their own Ghazal.