Poet and essayist Heather Christle will read from her newest book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf, and will be joined in conversation with bestselling poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar. Described as “part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare” (hachettebookgroup.com), In the Rhododendrons weaves memories of Christle’s sexual assault as a teenager in London with her mother’s recent confession of “a painful story from her past” that happened in London’s Kew Gardens, and both are bound by insights into Virginia Woolf and her own trauma, who “becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences.” Praised by Kaveh as “a triumph, an instant classic,” who adds, “Christle has become one of our art’s most urgent living practitioners,” In the Rhododendrons was named a Best/Most Recommended Book of the Season/Year by Town & Country, Chicago Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, The Millions, Literary Hub, and Daily Kos. 

Heather Christle is the author of The Crying Book (Catapult), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, Indie Next selection, and national bestseller that was translated into eight languages, awarded the Georgia Book Award for memoir, and adapted for radio by the BBC. An Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, Christle is also the author of four poetry collections including The Trees The Trees, which won the Believer Book Award and was adapted into a ballet by the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Elle, Granta, London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, and she was recently the recipient of a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship in nonfiction.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Martyr! as well as poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic. He is also the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine and co-editor with Paige Lewis of the anthology Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance. He lives in Iowa City.