Join us for an evening with Erika Meitner, who will read from her new poetry collection, Assembled Audience. 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: “What does it mean to gather together?” asks Assembled Audience, the seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner. In these poems, people congregate—over meals, at the beach, in protest and prayer and celebration, through vital acts of witness and collective mourning. Amid instability and peril, embodied gathering is not only a survival mechanism, but also a form of resistance.
Our speaker is a peripatetic philosopher, provocative and engaging, both a Cassandra and a Pied Piper who brings us into the urgencies of the present moment: climate change, the pandemic and its aftermath, gun violence, xenophobia, fracking, eroding reproductive rights, and the moralized pressure to “stay present” amid disorder and danger. Over and over, we return to the hard work of existing in the Anthropocene: despite all of our knowledge, everything is perilous, and safety is an illusion.
Brutally honest and lyrically dexterous, fusing Whitman’s generous expansiveness with Erika Meitner’s signature virtuosic electricity and wit, Assembled Audience reminds us that forced optimism and bland platitudes won’t save us—but luck and wonder might.
About the Author: Erika Meitner is the author of six previous books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; and Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022). Her poems have been published most recently in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, The New Republic, Orion, and elsewhere. Her seventh book, Assembled Audience, is due out from Milkweed Editions in September 2026. Meitner is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the creative writing program.
About the Moderator: Kiki Petrosino is the author of Perfect Italian: Poems, the memoir Bright (2022), and four other poetry books, all from Sarabande. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a professor of poetry at the University of Virginia, where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs. Petrosino 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, among other honors.
