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The Merwin Conservancy Presents Lewis Hyde and Matthew Zapruder in the Green Room

The Merwin Conservancy Presents Lewis Hyde and Matthew Zapruder in the Green Room

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Castle Theater

The Merwin Conservancy presents an intimate evening with celebrated poet, translator, and former poetry editor of the New York Times, Matthew Zapruder, in conversation with renowned scholar, author, and MacArthur Genius, Lewis Hyde in The Green Room, an environmental and literary salon series that fosters a reverence for language, nature, and imagination in our community. The duo will talk about why art matters, how the arts sustain us, and reinvigorate the world. 
 
Hyde and Zapruder will each give readings and host a conversation followed by an audience Q&A. Afterward, guests are invited to join a book signing at a courtyard reception with refreshments, book fair, and music.
 
ABOUT LEWIS HYDE
Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes the World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde's most recent book, Common as Air, is a spirited defense of our "cultural commons," that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. He is currently at work on A Primer for Forgetting, an exploration of the situations in which forgetfulness is more useful than memory. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is associate of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.
 
ABOUT MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
Poet, editor, and translator, Matthew Zapruder, is author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Come On All You Ghosts, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Sun Bear (2014), as well as Why Poetry (2017), a book of prose about reading poetry for a general audience. His second poetry collection, The Pajamaist, won the 2007 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. An associate professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor-at-large at Wave Books, and from 2016-17, held the annually rotating position of editor of the Poetry Column for New York Times magazine. As Dana Jennings noted in the New York Times, Zapruder has a “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture.” 
 
Presented by FIM Group. All ticket sales benefit the nonprofit Merwin Conservancy.