Discover a new collection on divorce and renewal during a reading with Mark Doty and Emily Hyland. In celebration of Hyland’s debut poetry collection, Divorced Business Partners (Howling Bird Press, 2024), friends Doty and Hyland will discuss their mentorship and reflect on connection and loss in their respective poetry.
Divorced Business Partners is a love story that follows the tender, brutal, routine, awkward and aching unraveling of a marriage. While building what would become a successful restaurant, Hyland maps the disintegration of the couple’s primal bond. Her evocative narrative voice and unvarnished portrayals reveal the power of poetry to lead us inward. How does grief find us in the smallest moments? What is family when it’s broken? This vivid portrait reflects the jagged path of divorce leading unexpectedly to a new kind of relationship.
Readings 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 Poets:
Mark Doty has published ten books of poems, including Fire to Fire: New & Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He is also the author of six books of nonfiction prose, most recently What is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the T.S.Eliot Prize in the U.K., the Stonewall Book Award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught in creative writing programs at Stanford, Princeton, Iowa, Columbia and New York University. He retired from Rutgers this year, and lives in the Hudson River Valley.
Emily Hyland’s debut collection, Divorced Business Partners, is forthcoming with Howling Bird Press in October 2024. Her second collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, is forthcoming with Cornerstone Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press, in September 2026. Hyland’s poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Review, Frontier Poetry, and The Hollins Critic, among others. She earned her MFA in poetry and her MA in English education from Brooklyn College. Her cookbook, Emily: The Cookbook, was published by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, in 2018. Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she writes and teaches at Yogasource, a beloved local studio that she co-owns and directs.