Famed author to speak at Greenwich Library with Westport poet laureate
Erika Meitner to read from her work on Saturday
GREENWICH — Celebrated poet and author Erika Meitner, who has been called “the quintessential 21st century storyteller,” will read from her work Saturday at the Greenwich Library as part of the Poet’s Voice series.
The author of five books of poetry, Meitner is director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. Her latest collection, “Holy Moly Carry Me,” was the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
Saturday, Meitner will also discuss writing and poetry with Diane Meyer Lowman, who is Westport’s inaugural poet laureate.
“In Holy Moly Carry Me,” Meitner transports readers into the heart of southern Appalachia as she explores what it means to be the only Jewish family in an Evangelical neighborhood and tells of the anxieties of raising one white son and one black son amid racial tensions and school lockdown drills,” according to the Greenwich Library.
Born and raised in Queens and Long Island, N.Y., Meitner is a first-generation American. Her father is from Haifa, Israel; her mother was born in a refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and Mauthausen concentration camps.
She lives in Blacksburg, Va. She attended Dartmouth College, Hebrew University and the University of Virginia, where she received an MFA in creative writing and a master’s in religious studies. Meitner was the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, the Blue Mountain Center and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was also the recipient of the 2021 Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award.
Her poetry and prose have been included in the anthologies “Best American Poetry (2011),” “Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (2010),” “Best African American Essays (2010),” “The Way We Work: Contemporary Writings from the American Workplace (2008)” and “Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (2008).
Lowman writes a weekly column called “Everything’s an Essay” and received a master’s in Shakespeare Studies from the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute. She has written more than 2,000 haiku and essays analyzing Shakespeare’s 37 plays.
The Poet’s Voice event will be held from 2 to 3 p.m. Nov. 20, in the library’s Berkley Theater. A meet and greet with the poet for young adults will be available at 1:30 p.m.
It will also be livestreamed. Registration is required by visiting www.greenwichlibrary.org or calling 203-622-7900.
All those who attend in person will be required to show proof of full vaccination — a CDC vaccination card (or a photo or photocopy of the card) or a negative PCR test taken within 72 hours of the event.
The Poet’s Voice series is supported by the Horace E. Manacher Poetry Fund and Friends of Greenwich Library.