Poet Erika Meitner to Give Glasgow Endowment Reading at W&L Meitner will read from her new collection, “Assembled Audience,” at the Oct. 29 event.

By Emily Innes Stanley
October 15, 2026

Washington and Lee University presents a public reading with poet Erika Meitner at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 29 in Northen Auditorium in Leyburn Library.

Meitner’s reading is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Glasgow Endowment. Meitner will read from her new book, “Assembled Audience,” and copies of the book will be available to purchase.

“Assembled Audience,” which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, is Meitner’s seventh poetry collection and explores what it means to be human in an increasingly precarious world. The poems depict the act of people coming together — over meals, at the beach, in protest, prayer and celebration, as witnesses or through collective mourning — as not only a survival mechanism, but a form of resistance against the urgencies of our present moment.

“I’m really excited to bring Erika and her urgent, smart and wildly capacious poetry to campus,” said Lesley Wheeler, the Henry S. Fox, Jr. Professor of English at W&L. “This new collection bears witness to so many of the crises assailing the world now — what one poem calls ‘the hard and dangerous work of having a body in the Anthropocene.’ She is truly, as Heather Christle writes, a significant American poet ‘at the top of her game.”

Meitner is the author of seven books of poems, including “Ideal Cities,” a 2009 National Poetry Series winner, and “Holy Moly Carry Me,” winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. She has received numerous fellowships, including from Yaddo, MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and her poems have appeared most recently in The New Yorker, Electric Literature, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, The New Republic, Orion and elsewhere. Meitner is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also directs the MFA program.

As part of her visit to W&L, Meitner will visit two English classes, including Wheeler’s “Poetry and Authenticity” class, where she will discuss how she makes history, science, politics and other challenging subjects so vividly present to readers.