Please join the Department of English Visiting Writers Series for a reading and Q&A with poet and alumna Natalie Shapero.
Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (Copper Canyon, 2021), Hard Child (Copper Canyon, 2021), and No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), as well as the pamphlet Today Hamlet (Out-Spoken, 2023). Her writing has appeared in The London Review of Books, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, a finalist designation from the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and an Assets for Artists residency fellowship from The Studios at MassMOCA. A former civil-rights lawyer, she works as an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.
Her latest book is Stay Dead (2025), published in the U.S. by Copper Canyon Press and in the U.K. by Out-Spoken Press. Stay Dead was longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. In this collection of poems, Shapero examines performance, power, comedy, and despair through the lenses of method acting and abstract expressionism.
This reading is free and open to the public, and it will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. Books will be available for sale from Prologue Bookshop.