Poets Night: Lena Moses Schmitt and Rachel Richardson

Please join us for an evening of poetry and conversation between Lena Moses-Schmitt and Rachel Richardson in celebration of their new books, followed by Q&A and signing.

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In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.

As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: “I often think about things so hard / I K*ll them.” And: “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.

Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.

Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her debut poetry collection True Mistakes was selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and is forthcoming from University of Arkansas Press in spring 2025. Her work appears in The Believer, Best New Poets, Ecotone, The Rumpus, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York, where she works as the assistant director of publicity at Catapult, Counterpoint, and Soft Skull Press.

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In this searching, defiant collection, award-winning poet Rachel Richardson takes up the existential losses of climate change and insists on the work of survival.

How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Rachel Richardson’s third collection, Smother, interrogates this impossible question. The poet, raising young daughters and grieving the death of a mother friend, documents a string of record-breaking fires across the California landscape and the rage, sorrow, and detachment that follow amidst the pervasive smoke. Environmental and physical predation—on the earth and on the female body—weave through the book in layers.

But these are not poems of giving up. The poems in Smother gather accomplices in grief and mothering, seek out guides and girlfriends, remember the dead, keep watch at the firebreaks, and plant new trees on the burn scars. From lyric forms to moments of prose and documentary collage, these poems sing their song of resistance made from the music that is available to us now.

Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother (Norton, 2025) and two other poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT and a winner of the Hopwood Award, as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. She teaches as Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MFA program at St. Mary's College, and lives in Berkeley.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Womb House Books, Temescal Alley, Oakland, United States