Jun
6
12:00 PM12:00

Queens Poetry Symposium

Queens Botanical Garden on June 6, 2026. 

Same Region, Many Tongues: Translating Two Eastern European Women Poets

Carlie Hoffman and Olena Jennings will speak about how they discovered their poets and read one poem that speaks to them more than others, mentioning translation difficulties. They will address what it is like translating a dead poet versus a living poet. They will talk about how both their texts combine the natural world with the human, sometimes in a violent manner. Both of their poets come from the same part of the world but write in different languages, so they will talk about linguistic diversity. Finally, they will have a conversation, asking each other questions about translation.

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Jul
25
to Jul 26

In-Person 2-Day Workshop: Carlie Hoffman: Desire, Myth, and the White‑Hot Center: A Two-Day Immersion in Poetic Craft and Critique

  • Google Calendar ICS

https://poetshouse.org/event/workshop-carlie-hoffman-desire-myth-two-day-immersion/

In Person | Saturday & Sunday | Jul 25 - 26 | 12 - 4pm ET

Jul 25, 2026 | 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm

$220.00 – $275.00

Desire, Myth, and the White‑Hot Center: A Two-Day Immersion in Poetic Craft and Critique

In this two-session seminar and workshop, we’ll gather at summer’s white‑hot center to think about how poems hold desire: urgent, unrequited, ecstatic, impossible. We’ll move from classical myth to contemporary work, reading poets who write into longing, desire, and the complicated layers of love and human connection.

The first meeting will be part close-reading, part generative lab. We’ll read poems together (mythic, lyric, and otherwise unruly) and respond to them through a series of prompts that invite you to write from your own sense of urgency, distance, fantasy, intimacy, heartbreak, and ecstasy, and so forth.

The second meeting will be a workshop devoted to your drafts. Together, we’ll talk about how to deepen emotional stakes, focus imagery, and make space on the page for contradictory feelings. By the end of the weekend, you’ll leave with new poems, a set of prompts you can return to all summer, and renewed ways of thinking about desire, connection, and what it means to draw from the white‑hot center in your own work.

Saturday & Sunday (8 hours over 2 days) | July 25 – 26 | 12 – 4pm ET | $275 ($220 for Members)
(Jul 25, 26)

This workshop will take place in the Stanley Kunitz Conference Room at Poets House.

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Mar
26
7:00 PM19:00

Remembering Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger with Edward Hirsch, Carlie Hoffman, and Yerra Sugarman

Link to RSVP

In-Person | Thursday | March 26 | 7-9pm

Edward Hirsch, Carlie Hoffman, and Yerra Sugarman will present a lecture on Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (1924–1942), a poet, translator, and librettist from Czernowitz (present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger from Song of the Yellow Asters (World Poetry Books, 2026), translated by Carlie Hoffman, will be read, and copies of the book will be available for purchase.

The younger cousin of Paul Celan, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger began writing as a teenager, composing original poems as well as translations from French, Yiddish, and Romanian into German. Despite her family’s modest means and the early loss of her father, she grew up amid Czernowitz’s vibrant polyglot culture, where poetry and language flourished. Between the ages of 15 and 17, she assembled her handwritten, handbound album Blütenlese, which includes 57 poems dedicated to her beloved Leiser Fichman. During World War II, the Meerbaum-Eisinger family was deported to the Michailowka forced-labor camp in Transnistria (now Transdniestria, a disputed enclave of Moldova). Selma died of typhus there on December 16, 1942, at the age of 18. Through the persistence of her friends and loved ones, her manuscript survived the war and remains a testament to her devotion to beauty, tenderness, and the lyric tradition.

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Apr
10
7:00 PM19:00

Poets House Launch

In-Person | Thursday | April 10 | 7-9pm

Celebrate Carlie Hoffman’s newest collection with readings from Rodney Terich Leonard, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, and Dr. Maya C. Popa. In One More World Like This World, Hoffman invokes mythological narratives to explore the predicaments of contemporary women.

Readings in Kray Hall followed by a reception in the Reading Room.

https://poetshouse.org/event/new-works-hoffman-leonard-maldonado-popa/

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Mar
29
10:35 AM10:35

“Thou Hast Thy Music Too”: The Poetry of Aging

Every life stage offers unique challenges and possibilities and, as Keats wrote in “To Autumn,” its particular music. Aging brings its dilemmas: accentuation of losses, bodily and mental impairments, diminishing time. These same challenges are grist for new perspectives, wisdom, and awareness of the temporal and the enduring. In this panel, four poets (of a certain age) will speak to different aspects of aging as a stage of life lived in and with poetry. A younger poet will also reflect on age.

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Mar
27
12:10 PM12:10

National Jewish Book Award Poetry Reading & Conversation

Five poets whose books have been honored by the National Jewish Book Awards come together to read from their collections and discuss what it means to write on Jewish themes today. The poets reflect on their writing relationships with Jewish histories, joy, trauma, and political injustices and brutalities. The reading includes both winners and finalists of the National Jewish Book Award in the category of poetry between 2018 and 2023.

https://s2.goeshow.com/awp/annual/2025/Conference_Schedule_Events.cfm?session_key=BCA52B13-C6DB-BDD0-813A-B57592831F82&session_date=Thursday,%20Mar%2027,%202025

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