About this Event
Join us at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Tuesday, May 20th at 7:00 PM when award-winning poet and author Maggie Smith is joined by Oakland poet Matthew Zapruder to discuss their latest books Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life. and I Love Hearing Your Dreams. Both authors will sign copies of thier books after the presentation.
Click here to order a copy of Dear Writer for the event
Click here to order a copy of I Love Hearing Your Dreams for the event
About Maggie's Book --
New York Times bestselling author and poet Maggie Smith distills creativity and the craft of writing with a practical guide perfect for fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.
Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.
About Matthew's Book --
From a poet whose “poems don’t merely attempt beauty; they attain it” (Boston Review), an enchanting and harrowing journey through the landscape of dreams and twenty-first century hopes and disillusions.
“Your dreams / have no hidden / agenda to be wise / they are made / to be forgotten / so something / can be known”
I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a book of reveries, of failed elegies, of “the last time that things were real” and the moments that come afterward. These are dream songs for an age of insomnia, where the poet is always awake “at that oddest hour / that does not end, / the crooked, unnumbered one” and the future seems to be “just the past in a suit / that will never be in style.” Yet dreams in Matthew Zapruder’s poems are also a place of possibility, of reality envisioned anew—sleep shows us not merely what the world is, but what it could be.
From a poet celebrated for his “razor eye for the remnants and revenants of modern culture” (The New York Times), I Love Hearing Your Dreams is a startlingly beautiful and deeply vulnerable book where lives journey into a mystifying place and emerge transformed.
MAGGIE SMITH is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of eight books of poetry and prose, including You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Good Bones, Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and My Thoughts Have Wings. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received a Pushcart Prize, and numerous grants and awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, the New York Times, the Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet and find her online https://maggiesmithpoet.com/.
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024), and five previous collections of poetry, including Father’s Day, Sun Bear, and Come on All You Ghosts, as well as Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor at large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. From 2016-17 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine, and was the Guest Editor for Best American Poetry 2022. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California.
THIS EVENT is free but registration is requested. Registration ends at 5:30 pm on May 20th, 2025.
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
