Join us for an evening with Lucy Alford, who will read from her debut poetry collection, Daylight / Savings. A conversation with Lisa Russ Spaar 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: Part elegy, ode, & homage. Part documentation, testimony, & glance.
Loosely woven around the wheel of the year in seasons of plenty and of lack, the poems of Daylight / Savings ask: what can be salvaged, sutured, or surrendered, of our shared and solitary wreck—bright days and broken things, unchosen and entangled as they are? In small acts of attention to the small, plain, and passing, these poems find bounty, absence, and abscess. Leaning tree, shards of shell, glint of girlhood, and childless grief. Tightly coiled, a knot of light casts its own shadows in turn, going by.
About the Author: Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, Lucy Alford is an associate professor of literature at Wake Forest University, specializing in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry and comparative poetics. As both a poet and a scholar, Alford is interested in embodied life, environmental precarity, and practices of attention in poetry and other artforms. Her first book, Forms of Poetic Attention (Columbia University Press, 2020), was awarded the Helen Tarter First Book Award from the American Comparative Literature Association. Her essays and articles can be found in Comparative Literature, Philosophy & Literature, Modern Language Notes, and American Literary History; her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Streetlight, Literary Matters, The Warwick Review, Action, Spectacle, Atelier, and Fence.
About the Moderator: Lisa Russ Spaar is the author/editor of fifteen books, including four poetry anthologies and a collection of essays about poetry, and most recently Paradise Close: A Novel and Soul Cake: Poems. A finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Virginia, where she directed the MFA Program for many years.
