Celebrate John Shoptaw‘s collection Near-Earth Object (Unbound Edition Press, 2024) with readings and a conversation between Shoptaw and Jenny Odell.
Jenny Odell will read virtually, and John Shoptaw will read in-person, in Kray Hall, with a reception to follow in the Viscusi Reading Room.
By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by Poets House Community Agreement. Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room.
About the readers:
Jenny Odell is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Inhabiting the Negative Space, and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Believer, and Emergence Magazine. Odell has been an artist in residence at Recology SF (otherwise known as the dump), the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department, and her visual work has been exhibited internationally. From 2013 to 2021, she taught in the Art Practice department at Stanford University.
John Shoptaw teaches poetry and ecopoetry in the English Department of UC Berkeley, where he is a member of the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative and the Berkeley Climate Change Network. His Times Beach won the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Arion, Oxford Public Philosophy, and elsewhere. His poetry is being anthologized in Treelines, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and The New Sent(i)ence. Jenny Holzer incorporated a poem of his in her installation at the Salesforce Transit Center. His Near-Earth Object is now out from Unbound Edition Press. The foreword, by Jenny Odell, appears online in The Paris Review.