In this event, poet Sara Burnett will read from her book Seed Celestial, winner of the 2021 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize.  Burnett’s poetry draws upon ancient Greco-Roman myths and the myth-making experience of her childhood as the daughter of a Cuban exile.  Her work grapples with timeless questions of origin, change, death, and rebirth while exploring the fraught political, racial, and ecological landscapes of our time.  In Seed Celestial, Burnett reflects on feminism, gun violence, motherhood, and climate change while simultaneously paying homage to De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”) a Latin epic poem about the universe written by the Roman poet Lucretius more than 2,000 years ago.