A Gathering of Poets | Why on This Longest Night Do We Read Poems?

On December 21, the longest night of the year, poets Dan Alter from California, Lynn Melnick from New York City, and Elizabeth Powell from Vermont shall join us at the Institute Library, at 847 Chapel Street, to read poems of theirs that shall explore matters Jewish and otherwise. And perhaps answer this very important question: Why do we read poems on the longest night of the year?

Dan Alter will read selections from his recent poetry collection My Little Book of Exiles from Eyewear Press. A fellow of the Arad Arts Project and a member of the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, he lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley and makes his living as an IBEW electrician. His poems and reviews have been published in journals, including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva.

Lynn Melnick is the author of the poetry collections If I Should Say I Have Hope (2012), Landscape with Sex and Violence (2017), and the forthcoming Refusenik (2022), as well as co-editor of Please Excuse This Poem: 100 Poets for the Next Generation (Viking, 2015). Her memoir, I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: On Trauma, Persistence, and Dolly Parton, is forthcoming from University of Texas Press’s American Music Series in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in APR, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and A Public Space.

Elizabeth Powell, professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University, is the author of three books of poems, most recently Atomizer (2020) and the novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of J. Crew Catalogues (2019). Some of her more recent poems have appeared in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, and Women’s Review of Books.