Fall for the Book 2021 Festival

Award-winning poets Maggie Smith and Victoria Chang discuss the objects of everyday life and family history — a hallway mirror, a marriage license, a photograph — and how we come to terms and know ourselves through them. Smith’s new collection, Goldenrod uses what Slate calls Smith’s “superpower”: brilliant metaphors that celebrate human emotions to explore everyday life with empathy and honesty. Time says, “To read Maggie Smith is to embrace the achingly precious beauty of the present moment.” Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief spans generations as Chang shapes her own identity through the trauma and loss of her family, and of being American and Chinese. Politics & Prose says, “While the papers left behind by Chang’s mother are a record of past events, Chang’s letters demonstrate how their effects continue to resonate―across time, oceans, and through generations… Imaginatively creating a conversation between past and present.” This conversation will be moderated by Nicole Tong, Fairfax Poet Laureate, and author of How to Prove a Theory.