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“A kick-ass counter-cultural icon.” —The New Yorker

The Museum welcomes acclaimed poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist Eileen Myles. A trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work, in the words of The New York Review of Books, “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.” Myles is the author of more than 20 books, including A Working Life, For Now, Evolution, Afterglow (a dog memoir), Chelsea Girls, and I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1974-2014. They bring to our consideration the ideas of identity, vocation, language, and place, which are also present in the current SBMA contemporary exhibition Inside/Outside. Myles’s many honors include 4 Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Creative Capital’s Literature Award and their Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant.

Book signing to follow.

Parallel Stories is a literary and performing arts series that pairs art and artists with award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim. This series functions as a multidisciplinary lens through which to view the Museum's collection and special exhibitions.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
Non-Member: $10.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

“A magician of perspective and scale.” – The New Yorker

In this conversation, resonating with both the past and tradition exemplified in the exhibition Flowers on a River and with the distillation and duality explored in Inside/Outside, Jenny Xie opens up, as US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera described, “multiple terrains of seeing.” With longing and memory, nuance and subtlety, the “anxiety of bilingualism,” and the unknowability of the self, Xie takes us deep into what is irreducible with pure piercing beauty.

Born in China and raised in New Jersey, Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University; and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022), long listed for the National Book Award in Poetry. Lauded for its precision, beauty and humanity, her work has appeared in Poetry, New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications.

Book signing to follow.

Parallel Stories is a literary and performing arts series that pairs art and artists with award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim. This series functions as a multidisciplinary lens through which to view the Museum's collection and special exhibitions.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
Non-Member: $10.00