About this Event
Event guidelines:
- Additional copies of the readers' books will be available for purchase at the event.
- A signing will follow the readings.
- The event will be livestreamed for free online here: https://youtube.com/live/C5MWO5rXLJw
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].
Celebrate 15 years of Leah Umansky's beloved reading series, Couplet! This month's reading features Christopher Kondrich, Thea Matthews, Elizabeth Metzger, & R.A. Villanueva.
Couplet is a quarterly reading series curated and hosted by Leah Umansky since 2011, featuring emerging and established poets.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of three books of poetry, including Tread Upon (Copper Canyon Press, 2026), and Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which won the National Poetry Series and was selected by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo, his poems appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. He is currently Poet-in-Residence for the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland.
Thea Matthews is a poet and an author of African and Indigenous Mexican descent. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing–Poetry from New York University and a B.A. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, ZYZZYVA, Alta Journal, Colorado Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and Kweli Journal, among other publications. She is the author of GRIME (City Lights Books, 2025) and Unearth [The Flowers] (Red Light Lit Press, 2020). Originally from San Francisco, California, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She has published two chapbooks, Bed and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review, TLS, and Poetry. She is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches poetry at 92NY and Columbia University.
R. A. Villanueva is the author of two award-winning collections of poetry: A Holy Dread (US: Alice James Books, 2026 / UK: the87press, 2027) and Reliquaria (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Leah Umansky is a writer, educator, artist and the author of the forthcoming memoir, Delicate Machine (Dzanc Books, 2027), and five books of poetry, most recently Of Tyrant (Word Works Books, 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS and The Slowdown Podcast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, POETRY, Bennington Review, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as The Guggenheim, The New York Public Library, Poetry School London, Poets House, Memorial Sloan Kettering and elsewhere. www.leahumansky.com
Event venue & nearby stays
Books Are Magic Montague, 122 Montague Street, Brooklyn, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.