Stephanie Burt will read from her latest book of poetry, We Are Mermaids. “The poems in We Are Mermaids can be skillfully decoded as trans allegories, or climate anxiety, or disgust at U.S. Fascism, but limiting these poems to one reading would miss the pleasures of their inventiveness, their playfulness, their ease at existing in many states at once.” –Robin Arble

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include Don’t Read Poetry: A Book about How to Read Poems, Advice from the Lights, The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them, The Art of the Sonnet, Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler, The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry, Parallel Play: Poems, Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden, and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.

This special program is co-sponsored by the University of Northern Iowa and the North American Review.