Megan Marshall

discusses

Elizabeth Bishop:
A Miracle for Breakfast

This event includes a book signing

Date

Feb
7
Tuesday
February 7, 2017
8:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store and Mass Humanities welcome Emerson College professor MEGAN MARSHALL—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and The Peabody Sisters—for a discussion of her latest book, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast.

About Elizabeth Bishop

Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America’s most revered poets. And yet—painfully shy and living out of public view in far-flung locations like Key West and Brazil—she has never been seen so fully as a woman and artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop’s letters—to her psychiatrist and to three of her lovers—to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares. 

These elements of Bishop’s life, along with her friendships with fellow poets Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, both important champions of her work, are brought to life with novelistic intensity. And by alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Megan Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader an original and compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined.

Megan Marshall
Megan Marshall

Megan Marshall

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, The Peabody Sisters, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast.  In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, her work has been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction (twice) and the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography. A past president of the Society of American Historians, Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program.  Her new book of essays, After Lives: A Biographer’s Memoir, will be published in February 2025.

Photo Credit: Sarah Putnam

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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Event Series: This Month's Selection for our Signed First Edition Club

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Co-Sponsored by Mass Humanities

Mass Humanities

 

Mass Humanities creates opportunities for the people of Massachusetts to transform their lives and build a more equitable Commonwealth through the humanities. Learn more at masshumanities.org.

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