Join us for an evening with Chet'la Sebree, who will read from her new poetry collection, Blue Opening. A conversation with Kiki Petrosino will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Blue Opening, Chet'la Sebree's brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins-of illness, of language, of the universe-as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for answers to the unknowable.
With startling clarity and vivid tenderness, Blue Opening calls into question not only where to begin, but also how to create, across thirty-two poems that press the fluid boundaries of form through sonnets, prose poems, odes, and two unforgettable poetic sequences. As the speaker traverses loss, possibility, and the choice, or often the lack of choice, in the direction of her future, she determines to press forward even as she is "unsure of what shape this language should take / and hulling, from blue rock, faith."
About the Author: Chet'la Sebree is the author most recently of the poetry collections Blue Opening (Tin House) as well as Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress. Raised in the mid-Atlantic, she earned an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in poetry, from American University. Chet'la's poetry and prose have appeared in Colorado Review, Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, Pleiades, Guernica, Poetry International, and The Yale Review. Currently, Chet'la is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. Her debut essay collection is forthcoming from The Dial Press in 2026.
About the Moderator: Kiki Petrosino is the author of White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020) and three other poetry books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her memoir, Bright, was released from Sarabande in 2022. She is a professor of poetry at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, and the Spalding Prize.