Michael Hettich & Sebastian Matthews will visit City Lights on Saturday, August 23rd at 3:00pm. Michael will read from his new poetry collection, A Sharper Silence, and Sebastian from his latest book, The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces.
Michael Hettich’s A Sharper Silence, published by Terrapin Books in 2025, has been called a “heartfelt, heartbreaking collection” (Marie Harris). His previous book of poetry, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022 won the 2024 Brockman-Campbell Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in many journals and anthologies, and he has published more than a dozen books of poetry across four decades. His other honors include several Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize, a Florida Book Award, the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the inaugural Hudson-Fowler Prize from Slant magazine at the University of Central Arkansas. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and taught for many years at Miami Dade College where he was awarded an Endowed Teaching Chair. A new book, And the Poet Said… was published in 2024. His website is michaelhettich.com.
Sebastian Matthews is the author of the memoir In My Father’s Footsteps (W.W. Norton & Co.) as well as two collections of poetry, We Generous and Miracle Day, both published by Red Hen Press. A third collection, Beginner’s Guide to a Head-on Collision, came out from Red Hen Press in 2017.
Matthews received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. He taught for over a decade at Warren Wilson College in their undergraduate writing program, as well as serving on the faculty at the Great Smokies Writing Program at the University of North Carolina, Asheville and at the Queen’s University of Charlotte, Low-Residency in Creative Writing (MFA). He has been a visiting writer at Franklin and Marshall, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Pitzer College, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (Meacham Conference), UNC-Wilmington’s Writers Week, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. He lives with his wife and son in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is working on a hybrid collection of poems, prose sketches, and snapshots, tentatively entitled In & Among. The Life & Times of American Crow, initially a boxed-set, limited edition collage novel, is now available as a paperback.
You may also like the following events from City Lights Bookstore:
- Next month, 7th August, 06:00 pm, Natalie C. Anderson: THAT KIND OF GIRL in Sylva
- Next month, 9th August, 03:00 pm, Poetry with Mackenzie Kozak, Brit Washburn, & Michael Dechane in Sylva
- This September, 6th September, 03:00 pm, Scott Gould: PEACE LIKE A RIVER with Brian Railsback in Sylva
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