The Woodberry Poetry Room invites you to Wax Poetics, a series that brings together our landmark audio archive with readings by contemporary poets. This season, Shane McCrae will join us for an evening devoted to John Berryman (1914-1972), whose previously uncollected Dream Songs McCrae edited for Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025. Introduction by Prof. Stephanie Burt.

The evening will begin with McCrae sharing selections from his own work alongside recently digitized recordings of Berryman from the Poetry Room's archives, followed by a book signing and reception. All are welcome to this evening of collective listening and communing with voices old and new. 

In-Person Attendance: Please stay tuned. Venue TBD. Book sales provided by Grolier Poetry Book Shop. Free and open to the public. 

Online Attendance: Livestreaming available via the WPR YouTube Channel.

Shane McCrae is the author of nearly a dozen books of poetry, including New and Collected Hell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), a book-length poem and a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award. Other books include The Many Hundreds of the Scent (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); Cain Named the Animal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), a finalist for the Forward Prize; Sometimes I Never Suffered (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Rilke Prize; In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. McCrae is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, the 2023 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, the 2022 Michael Marks Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

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.