“a letter in the / past tense / about the / future is / my latest / time machine / you should try it”  –CAConrad

As part of the Poetry Coalition’s 2025 summer programming on the shared theme of Poetry & Shelter, we will present an event and reception featuring poet CAConrad. CA will give an afternoon reading, and there will also be a celebration of a new installation of their poetry on the window of our building. A pamphlet of CA’s poems will be available free of cost to all in attendance.

“CAConrad’s poems invite the reader to become an agent in a joint act of recovery, to step outside of passivity and propriety and to become susceptible to the illogical and the mysterious,” wrote former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. We agree with her statement, and hope you can join us on this day.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin, 2024). They received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages, and they coedited SUPPLICATION: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books). They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Tucson, Arizona, as well as in Spain and Portugal. They teach at the Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Please visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

The Poetry Coalition is an alliance of nearly thirty independent poetry organizations across the United States. The Academy of American Poets is the administrative and fiscal coordinator of the Poetry Coalition, which is supported by the Mellon Foundation. Woodland Pattern is a founding member of the Coalition, and we are grateful to the Academy and Mellon for their support of our collective work.

Poetry Event: Poetry and Shelter with CAConrad