May’s installment of What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series brings together two poets who have, in fact, already brought themselves together by collaborating on a chapbook called We Are Not Where We Are. This book excavates new meaning from Thoreau’s Walden through the precise deployment of erasure, enacting a necessary challenge to old Henry David’s 19th Century perspectives.

Jenny George is the author of After Image (Copper Canyon Press, 2024; PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry finalist) and The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.  

Matt Donovan is the author most recently of We Are Not Where We Are (Bull City Press, 2025) which was co-authored with Jenny George, and The Dug-Up Gun Museum (BOA 2022).  He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. Donovan serves as the director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

It’s all happening on Wednesday, May 13, at 7:30pm Eastern. Make sure you register at bit.ly/WTUIMay2026 so you don’t miss this!