Tuesday, February 3, 2026
7:30 – 8:30pm ET / 4:30 – 5:30pm PT
Free registration required
Join the Jesuit Media Lab Book Club for a live Zoom conversation with poet Marie Howe on her collection “New and Selected Poems,” which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The live event will be facilitated by JML Book Club moderators Nick Ripatrazone and Mike Jordan Laskey.
Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles.
This essential volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections — including “What the Living” Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted “Magdalene” (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood — and contains more than 15 new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about aging while walking the dog, Howe is “a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy” (Dorianne Laux).
Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, “New and Selected Poems,” which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; “Magdalene: Poems”; “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”; “The Good Thief”; and “What the Living Do,” and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, “In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.” Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review and The Partisan Review, among others. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. In 2015, she received the Academy of American Poets Poetry Fellowship, and from 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State.
Howe lectures and gives workshops on the topics of faith, poetry and prayer. She illuminates ways to pay attention to our own intimate discourse with the divine — and how writing can become a gateway to faith. When we write we write into the unknown. Faith is not a destination but a muscle. Our arrival is evidence of the experience of faith in transformative alchemy of words, silence, music, imagination. The poem is the residue of this experience — both the residue and the way.
If you have any questions about the event, email Mike Jordan Laskey at jccucommunications@jesuits.org.
Marie Howe is the author of five volumes of poetry, “New and Selected Poems,” which won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; “Magdalene: Poems”; “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”; “The Good Thief”; and “What the Living Do,” and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, “In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic.” Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review and The Partisan Review, among others.
Mike Jordan Laskey is the director of communications at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. He leads a team responsible for the Jesuits.org website, social media and vocation promotion.
Nick Ripatrazone is a writer, editor and teacher. He is the culture editor for Image Journal and a contributing editor for the Catholic Herald (UK).
