Poetry Reading: Writing as Alchemy with Laynie Browne, Julie Carr, & Chloe Garcia Roberts

The poets read from their new books that, in different ways, engage in intertextual communion with the living and dead, with other writers and texts, in acts of alchemical transformation.  
  
LAYNIE BROWNE  
Laynie Browne's recent books of poetry include: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, 2025), Everyone & Her Resemblances (Pamenar, 2024), and Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter, 2023. She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2012) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat, 2021). Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.  
  
JULIE CARR  
Julie Carr is the author of 15 books of poetry and prose, including The Garden, book one of the trilogy Overflow (Essay Press and Pamenar Press, 2025), and Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). She is the co-editor of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). She co-translated Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies (Commune Editions and Pamenar Press). Carr has collaborated with dance artist K.J. Holmes, video artist and poet Carolina Ebeid, and musician Ben Roberts. She is the co-founder of Counterpath Press, Counterpath Gallery, and Counterpath Community Garden. She hosts the podcast Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone.  
   
CHLOE GARCIA ROBERTS  
Chloe Garcia Roberts is a poet and translator from Spanish and Chinese. Her most recent book is Fire Eater: A Translator's Theology (co • im press, 2024), and her translations include Li Shangyin’s Derangements of My Contemporaries (New Directions, 2014) and the forthcoming novel Carne de Dios by Mexican author Homero Aridjis. She works as deputy editor of the Harvard Review and as a lecturer of poetry at MIT.