Join us for the first meeting of this creative, catalyzing book club, dedicated to the work of Fanny Howe (1940-2025). In this session, Katie Peterson, author of Fog and Smoke (FSG, 2024), will lead a discussion of Manimal Woe (Arrowsmith, 2021). The last book published in Howe's lifetime, Manimal Woe is an undefinable meditation on ethics, American culture, politics, and family. The subject of the book is the very value of a human life: "I wanted to know why, when slavery formally ended, it went on....."  

We will explore together the example and legacy of this work, whose way of proceeding reminds us of the capacity of art-making in a time when resistance is necessary. A gift to writers who resist genre distinctions and to all thinkers who grapple with urgent moral questions, Manimal Woe includes prose, Socratic questioning, poetry, and generous excerpts from the letters of her father Mark DeWolfe Howe (a renowned Harvard legal scholar and a dedicated lawyer for the NAACP). Audience members are encouraged to read the book in advance, if possible. This is an informal, generative discussion, and all ideas are welcome.

In-Person Attendance: Woodberry Poetry Room, Lamont Library, Room 330. 
Free and open to the public. Seating is limited, arrive early if possible.
 

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel.

 

KATIE PETERSON's most recent collection of poetry is Fog and Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). Her previous book, Life in a Field (2021), is a collaboration with the photographer Young Suh. She is the author of other books of poetry: This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), Permission (New Issues, 2013), The Accounts (University of Chicago, 2013), and A Piece of Good News (FSG, 2019), a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in 2020. She is also the editor of the New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell (FSG, 2017). She is the Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Davis, where she is Professor of English and a Chancellor’s Fellow. She is an Associate Editor for the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press.