Marie Howe and Ayana Mathis
Two distinct literary sensibilities converge in a dialogue moderated by Hafizah Augustus Geter, probing how literature maps the enduring shifts within and around us.
Marie Howe, recipient of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2024 collection, New and Selected Poems, examines the ordinary with uncommon clarity. Her work—from the intimate reckonings of What the Living Do to the spiritual inquiries of Magdalene—eschews grand gestures to reveal the quiet transformations embedded in daily existence. The New York Times Magazine notes her "radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose"; poet Dorianne Laux observes her ability to distill "human sorrow and ordinary joy."
Ayana Mathis came to attention with The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, an Oprah’s Book Club selection and New York Times Book Review cover feature that reimagined the American family saga. Her novel The Unsettled (2023) traces the volatile continuities between a historic Black town in Alabama resisting erasure and 1980s Philadelphia buckling under Reagan-era policies. Through three generations, Mathis charts how systemic pressures fracture communities while igniting acts of reinvention.
Geter will moderate a discussion examining craft and conscience: how personal and historical legacies are metabolized into art, and the role of faith and doubt in times of fracture.
Date
Jun 21, 9:30am to 10:30am
Featuring
Marie Howe
Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Howe’s brother, John, who died of AIDS in 1989. In 1995, she coedited the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995).
Ayana Mathis
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club selection, and The Unsettled, winner of McSweeney’s inaugural Gabe Hudson Prize and a 2023 Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. Her essays and criticism appear in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and more. A 2025–26 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, Mathis has also held fellowships at the American Academy in Berlin and the NYPL’s Cullman Center. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she later became its first African-American woman assistant professor. She teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College and is currently pursuing a Master of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary.
Hafizah Augustus Geter
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian-American poet, writer, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. Her debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, (Random House, 2022) is winner of the 2023 PEN Open Book Award, winner of a 2023 Lammy Award in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction from Lambda Literary, a New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022, and a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize.
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