About this Event
Join us at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Friday, May 15 when celebrated poet and author Eleni Sikelianos comes to the store to share her new memoir Memory Rehearsal. Eleni will be joined in conversation by Tess Taylor and will sign copies of her book after the presentation.
to preorder a copy of Memory Rehearsal.
A genre-busting encounter between a poet and her ancestral past documenting a startling intersection of queer history, ancient theater, utopian visions, and modern poetry.
In 1901, Eva Palmer abandoned her life as a privileged New York socialite, moving to Paris with her lover, the writer, and salonist, Natalie Barney. The two Americans became the center of a wild tangle of lesbian love affairs and backyard performances based in an intentional reimagining of Sappho's work and life. This hotbed of early European modernism saw in the ancient past the possibility for sexual and artistic emancipation, especially for lesbian women.
A chance encounter led Eva to Greece, where she married Angelos Sikelianos, a visionary poet who would become a Greek national hero. Together, they decided to stage a revival of the ancient Delphic festivals, convinced that it would open a path to world peace. By the end of two festivals, their meticulous reproductions had managed to change the course of modern Greek cultural history, even as their marriage dissolved. Eva returned to the U.S. and spent the next decades of her life in debt, but she never stopped pursuing her vision, convinced of the revolution of consciousness these art festivals could bring about.
Celebrated American poet Eleni Sikelianos grew up knowing little of her illustrious ancestors, and it was not until the age of 20, on her first trip to Greece, that she encountered the breadth of their legacy. In Memory Rehearsal, Sikelianos unearths the story of her pioneering ancestor trying to make a place for herself, in a text that shifts between prose, poetry, imaginary performance texts, fiction, and nonfiction, with archival and family photographs.
This is the third book in a trilogy of hybrid memoirs in which Sikelianos reckons with a family shaped by mental illness, homelessness, and addiction. Grappling with knots of personal and broader histories, she performs a powerful act of recovery, re-situating herself by claiming her lineage.
Born into a family of tree workers, bohemians, poets, ne'er-do-wells, visionaries, and smalltime sort-of hustlers, ELENI SIKELIANOS is a poet, writer, collaborator, and "master of mixing genres." As a student of the poets of Naropa, she is a lineage-holder in the Outrider poetics family tree. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral work. She has published ten books of poetry (most recently, Your Kingdom, 2023) and two unclassifiable hybrid works, sometimes called nonfiction, sometimes memoirs, sometimes fiction: The Book of Jon and You Animal Machine. Among other honors, she has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Fulbright Artists fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in nonfiction.
TESS TAYLOR is a poet, playwright and critic. Her work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning. She has published five celebrated poetry collections: The Misremembered World; The Forage House; Rift Zone, one of the Boston Globe’s best books of 2020, and Work & Days, one of the NY Times best poetry books of 2016. Her anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them gathers contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis. Her collage poem Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, was adapted for stage in 2025 and premiered to a sold out run at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Taylor is also an essayist and reviewer: her writing appears in Harpers Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times.
THIS EVENT is free but registration is requested. Registration ends at 6:30 pm on May15.
BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.
DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.
WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows.
WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.
PLEASE leave your non-support companion animals at home.
OUR shared restrooms are not accessible after 6:30 PM, please plan accordingly.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Mrs Dalloway's, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, United States
USD 0.00
