Chance Meetings: Langdon Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop's "North & South" + Special Pricing Inside!

The Authors Guild Foundation is excited to present Chance Meetings, a new online literary seminar inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting, a dazzling group biography that offers a striking vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War.

We are pleased to announce that our customers can attend at a special price of $25 per ticket, instead of the regular price of $40. Check out the official page on the Authors Guild website, select the online seminar you'd like to attend, and enter the code CMDISC at checkout to get your special price.

The next seminar will take place on November 13th, 12:30 PM EST, where Langdon Hammer will focus on Elizabeth Bishop's North & South. 

Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
— What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map- makers’ colors.

From the first poem in her first book (“The Map,” North & South, 1946), Elizabeth Bishop emerged as a writer whose work is widely celebrated as being “more wryly radiant, more touching, and more unaffectedly intelligent than any written in our lifetime,” wrote James Merrill.

Join Langdon Hammer, who is at work on a biography of Elizabeth Bishop, for a discussion of North & South—“the first book of poetry Elizabeth Bishop wrote and the first book by Bishop that I read,” writes Hammer. “Fifty years later, I’m still reading and teaching and writing about it, permanently seduced by its strangeness and how it makes the world look when I pick my eyes up from the page. During the eleven years Bishop spent writing the poems in the book, Marianne Moore was her mentor. Rachel Cohen devotes a chapter to the two of them. We’ll look closely at their complex and peculiar relationship.”

Learn more about Chance Meetings and the seminar schedule here.