Name: An Evening with Marie Howe and Bruce Beasley: Readings and Conversations about Poetry and Prayer
Start: 2026-05-07T17:00:00-04:00
Location: 60 Church St, Asheville, NC, United States, North Carolina 28801

Trinity Episcopal Church Asheville will host An Evening with Marie Howe and Bruce Beasley: Readings and Conversations about Poetry and Prayer on Thursday, May 7, 2026, at 7:00 p.m. This special program brings together two widely acclaimed American poets for an exploration of how language, faith, and imagination meet in the practice of prayer and the art of poetry.
Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Magdalene: Poems; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time; The Good Thief; and What the Living Do. She is also co-editor of the essay collection In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. Her poems have appeared in leading journals including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. Howe has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected her for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2015 and served as Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012–2014; in 2025, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Bruce Beasley, author of nine collections of poetry including Prayershreds, All Soul Parts Returned, and Theophobia, is known for his probing, lyrical explorations of faith, doubt, language, and the mysteries of consciousness and embodiment. His work has been widely honored and engages theological, philosophical, and scientific questions with intensity and imagination.
During the evening, Howe and Beasley will read from their work and engage in conversation about how poetry can become a form of prayer, contemplation, and revelation. The event is free and open to the public.
The program will take place at Trinity Episcopal Church in Asheville. For more information, visit trinityasheville.org or contact The Rev. Amy Peterson at [email protected].