Join us for an evening with Mary Jane Nealon, who will speak about her new book, In the Form of Bread: On Becoming Human. A conversation with Virginia LeBaron 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: In this collection of vignettes—heartbreaking and often humorous—Nealon explores caregiving as both sacred practice and human risk. She looks back to her relationship with a father devastated by the early death of her brother; to tending men—some with AIDS, some drunk, some sober—living in Bowery flophouses; to confronting racism; to the quiet instruction of a dog who teaches attention by gazing back. The essays ask what price we pay when we offer ourselves wholeheartedly to one another, and what it means to remain open to being more than human in a fractured world.
About the Author: Mary Jane Nealon is a retired nurse with an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and was the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellow in 2004–2005. She has two poetry collections: Rogue Apostle and Immaculate Fuel, both from Four Way Books. Her memoir, Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life, was published by Graywolf Press. Her newest collection of personal essays, In the Form of Bread: On Becoming Human, will be available in September of 2026. She lives in Wall Township, NJ. You can find her online at mjnealon.com.
About the Moderator: Virginia LeBaron is a nurse and writer of poetry and nonfiction, including the chapbook Cardinal Marks (Finishing Line Press) and the ethnography Caring in Context (Routledge Press). Her writing has been supported by residencies with the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and she is an alum of the Lighthouse Poetry Collective. Her poetry collection, Care, a reckoning, was a finalist for the 2025 Black Lawrence Press St. Lawrence Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Potomac Review, South 85 Journal, Winter Anthology, and Pigeon Pages, among others. She is a Charlottesville native and is on the faculty at the UVA School of Nursing.
