Rosanna Warren: The Fair Fields

Overview

Award-winning poet Rosanna Warren joins us for a reading and conversation celebrating the launch of The Fair Fields, her luminous new memoir in vignettes.

Rosanna Warren is not simply a gifted poet writing from within a distinguished literary inheritance; she is an original mind who has transformed that inheritance into a body of work entirely her own. Writing with lyric intensity about her upbringing in a literary household — her parents are Robert Penn Warren, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the King’s Men, and Eleanor Clark, National Book Award-winning author of The Oysters of Locmariaquer — Warren brings philosophy, history, and the visual arts into her ken, melding intellectual precision with an expansive curiosity about how we make meaning from the fragments of memory. “Vivid, lyrical, mesmerizing,” writes Claire Messud, “The Fair Fields is the best kind of poet’s memoir: each word, alive, brings worlds to life.”

Neither conventional memoir nor simple collection of reminiscences, The Fair Fields centers on Warren’s upbringing in suburban Connecticut in the 1950s and ‘60s and the legendary circle of writers, visual artists, musicians, editors, and publishers who passed through her family’s life. Through intimate recollections and finely observed portraits, Warren evokes not only a family but a vanished constellation of postwar American intellectual life, alive with argument, artistic ambition, and the restless exchange of ideas.

In a reading and conversation celebrating the launch of the book, hear Warren discuss poetry’s relationship to memory and inheritance, and the lifelong work of becoming an artist.

“Among the best portraits of an artist coming of age I have ever read.” — Sigrid Nunez