An Evening of Poetry with Christopher Kempf

LST invites you to a poetry reading and discussion as part of our 2022 focus on Making Meaning. We are honored to welcome Dr. Christopher Kempf to lead us on Monday, May 2 at 7:00 pm CDT via Zoom.

In his new poetry collection, What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021), Christopher Kempf uses the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he lived for two years, as a way to engage ongoing conversations involving race, regional identity, and ethics of memory in the United States. While sharing poems from the collection, Kempf will also discuss the ambitions of the book in contemporary social and artistic contexts, at the same reflecting on his own experience living in Gettysburg during recent social strife. Kempf will also field questions from the audience. Shuttling between past and present, the personal and the public, Kempf examines in this book the many pasts that inhere, now and forever, in the places we occupy. In addition to What Though the Field Be Lost, Kempf is the author of the poetry collection Late in the Empire of Men (Four Way, 2017) and the scholarly book Craft Class: The Writing Workshop in American Culture (Johns Hopkins, 2022). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, Kempf received his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Chicago and currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.

Registration: $25. Included with your registration is a copy of What Though the Field Be Lost, to be shipped to you within two weeks of the event.