Poets & Writers Theater

“This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus. The hermanos have been preparing in the dirt yard behind the morada,” reads Kirstin Valdez Quade from her award-winning debut novel, The Five Wounds (Norton, 2021), in this 2021 virtual reading for the James Merrill House’s Writer-in-Residence reading series.

“As I often tell students: What other people call revision, I call writing,” says poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach about writing his books The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Forever (Norton, 2021) as a writer-in-residence in this 2021 installment of James Merrill House’s video series Studio 107. Longenbach died at the age of sixty-two on July 29, 2022.

“It’s a book about trying to figure out how to live while around you people are dying. How do you learn to live with tremendous loss?” says Mark Wunderlich about his latest poetry collection, God of Nothingness (Graywolf Press, 2021), in this video for the James Merrill House’s virtual series Studio 107, which interviews former writers in residency about their writing process.