The Woodberry Poetry Room is proud to partner with The Elegy Project to host a two-part event, featuring an afternoon elegy-writing workshop and an evening reading by Peter Gizzi, author of the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning collection Fierce Elegy (Wesleyan, 2023).

3:00-5:00pm: ELEGY WORKSHOP: At a time of profound personal, cultural, and political loss, we will come together to explore poems of mourning and memory, through a series of writing exercises and provocations that engage with the Poetry Room’s book collection and our own experiences and histories. The workshop will be led by David Sherman (Brandeis University) and Karen Bishop (Rutgers University), founders of the non-profit literary initiative The Elegy Project, which distributes poems in public places as a way to make grief less lonely and our shared world more interesting.

In-Person Attendance: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330. No reservations required, all poets welcome. Please note: you do not have to participate in the workshop to attend the reading.

6:00pm: READING BY PETER GIZZI: A special reading by Peter Gizzi, author of Fierce Elegy, introduced by David Sherman.  Book sales provided by Grolier Poetry Book Shop. 

In-Person Attendance: Edison Newman Room, Houghton Library. Free and open to the public.

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel.

PETER GIZZI is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Fierce Elegy (2023) Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award; Now It’s Dark (2020); and Archeophonics (2016), a Finalist for the National Book Award; all from Wesleyan. In the UK, Carcanet published Sky Burial: New and Selected Poems (2020) and in 2024 Penguin UK published an expanded edition of Fierce Elegy (Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize). His honors include fellowships from The Rex Foundation, The Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He has twice been the recipient of The Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. In 2018 Wesleyan published In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi. He is currently a Senior Global Fellow in Poetry at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Please contact us with any questions about this event. We can be reached by email at poetryrm@fas.harvard.edu or via phone at (617) 495-2454. We encourage persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about physical access to contact Houghton Library at least three days in advance of the reading.