Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th Street
New York, NY 10011
United States
Admission: $25
Join the Poetry Society of America for a special program featuring writers Sarah Ruhl, Angela Chen, and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, who will share and reflect on the poems, letters, and journals of poets who explored – with verve, intellect, and grace – the presence of death in their lives and their work. Angela Chen will present on Japanese Death Poems (Tuttle Publishing, 2018), an anthology of jisei written by Zen monks and haiku poets on the verge of death. Sarah Ruhl will read from Letters from Max (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a collection of letters she exchanged with the celebrated young poet Max Ritvo (1990-2016) in the last years of his battle with cancer, in which she writes of “the eternal yes that poets sing about, the yes of the poet’s immortality.” Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon will share and reflect on prolific and brilliant poet Lucille Clifton’s (1936–2010) embrace of mortality in her work.
Sarah Ruhl
Sarah Ruhl’s plays include In the Next Room, or the vibrator play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee), and The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), among many others. She is recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant, and of, most recently, the 2016 Steinberg Prize. She is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Studded with poems and songs, this correspondence is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy.