November 15 – Alan Shapiro and Jason Sommer – in person

Alan Shapiro has published 14 poetry collections, most recently, By and By, Proceed to Check Out, Against Translation, Reel to Reel, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Night of the Republic, finalist for both the National Book Award and the International Griffin Prize. Winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, LA Times Book Prize, and an award in literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new book of poems, Diver, was published by Unbound Edition Press in April, 2026.

Jason Sommer is the author of six poetry collections. Mirror Stage, forthcoming from Unbound Editions, follows Portulans in the University of Chicago Press’s Phoenix Poets series. Among other awards, his books have been honored with a Society of Midland Author’s Prize for Other People’s Troubles and the Crab Orchard Review Prize for The Laughter of Adam and Eve. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, Sommer has won a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award and has held fellowships at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer’s conferences.  He has published translations of Irish language poems and, with Hongling Zhang, collaborative book-length translations of Chinese fiction: Wang in Love and Bondage: Three Novellas by Wang Xiaobo and The Bathing Women by Tie Ning, which was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize. Sommer’s latest publication is the memoir Shmuel’s Bridge: Following the Tracks to Auschwitz with My Survivor Father from Charlesbridge Publishing in Watertown, MA.