Poets GC Waldrep and Karen An-Hwei Lee will read from their newest collections, Beautiful Immunity and The Opening Ritual.

GC Waldrep’s The Opening Ritual is described by bestselling author and novelist Kaveh Akbar as “the kind of furiously curious, unabashedly ambitious poetry book I want to show everyone, to prove such books can still be written.”

G.C. Waldrep was born and raised in the South. He earned his BA from Harvard University, a PhD in history from Duke University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa. His collections of poetry include Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Disclamor (2007); Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize; Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (2011), a collaborative book of poems with John Gallaher; the long poem Testament (2015); and The Opening Ritual (2024). His honors and awards include prizes from the Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, and residencies from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Campbell Corner Foundation. He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.

Karen An-Hwei Lee will read from Beautiful Immunity, which asks how we create good in an imperfect world of fallible souls. Poet Cole Swenson says of this collection, “In this ringing and consummate work, Lee reconnects us with Christianity’s foundations as a resistance movement…She then turns this lens on today’s crucial issues, particularly climate change and its explosive effects, demonstrating that adamant hope can translate into vigorous action through language applied in the most incisive and persuasive ways.”

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of The Maze of Transparencies (Ellipsis Press, 2019), Phyla of Joy (Tupelo, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sarabande, 2004), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her first novel, Sonata in K, was published in 2017. A book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series, and she is the translator of Doubled Radiance: Poetry & Prose of Li Qingzhao (Singing Bone Press, 2018), the first volume in English to collect Li’s work in both genres. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, Lee currently serves in the administration at Point Loma Nazarene University in Southern California. She earned an MFA from the Program in Literary Arts at Brown University and a PhD in British & American Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She currently lives near Chicago.