Campbell McGrath - "Fever of Unknown Origin" - Chicu Reddy

Campbell McGrath will discuss Fever of Unknown Origin. He will be joined in discussion by Chicu Reddy. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

This event will be held in person at The Seminary Co-op.

REGISTER HERE

About the book: A collection of profound and piercing poems from a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize about navigating the modern world in search of beauty that will endure. Fever of Unknown Origin opens at a remote crossroads, where the speaker considers the intersection of history, beauty, and destruction: "the past / is paper / and the present, a match . . ." What follows is an urgent tour of landscapes--environmental, political, and personal--that reframes our perception of modern America and leads the reader into "An empire of rags and photons" where we must look to the past to clarify our futures.

With sublime wit and a Whitmanian eye, McGrath delivers a stunning collection of warnings, love letters, and praise songs for all that manages to weather the perennial pressures of time: frog ponds, stadium rubble, and the endless cycle of seasons, which usher us deeper into an era we cannot yet know.

About the author: Campbell McGrath is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Fever of Unknown Origin (Knopf, May 2023), Spring Comes to Chicago, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century. He has received numerous literary prizes for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, as well as in scores of literary reviews and quarterlies. Born in Chicago, and a graduate of the University of Chicago, he lives in Miami Beach and teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing and a Distinguished University Professor of English.

About the interlocutor: Chicu Reddy is the author of Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), Voyager—named one of the best books of poetry in 2011 by The New Yorker, The Believer, and NPR—and Facts for Visitors, which won the 2005 Asian American Literary Award. He has written on poetry for The New York Times and The New Republic, and his book of literary criticism, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry, was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The NEA, the Creative Capital Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation have awarded him grants and fellowships, and in Fall 2015, he delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the doctoral program in English at Harvard University, he is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.