Open House: A Community Reading with Dorothea Lasky, D.S. Waldman, Wendy Xu and Their Students

close at 4pm, and readers will be announced at 5pm. For questions about the reading, please reach out to support@poetshouse.org. The reading will be held in Kray Hall. The People’s Poetry Gathering is co-presented by City Lore, Bowery Poetry, and Poets House. Founded as a biennial event in 1999 by City Lore and Poets House, with Bowery Poetry joining soon after, The People’s Poetry Gathering assembles poets from New York City and beyond to pursue discourse, exchange, and cultural preservation through poetry. In 2026, the Gathering returns to Lower Manhattan for the first time in twenty years. Find other People s Poetry Gathering programs at Poets House HERE Find a comprehensive list of all People’s Poetry Gathering programs HERE The suggested donation for this event is $10. All donations benefit Poets House. You will be able to choose your contribution amount when you RSVP online or at the door. All are welcome; no one will be turned away for lack of funds. By attending or participating in this program, you agree to abide by our Community Agreement. Events at Poets House are popular, and seating is first-come, first-seated. We have several seats reserved for people with access needs. If events reach capacity, seating will be available in an overflow viewing room. About the Poets: Dorothea Lasky is the author of six books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY and a book about Sappho. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Snakes (Tungsten Press) and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney’s) and is a Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania and has been educated at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Washington University. D.S. Waldman is the author of the poetry collection Atria (Liveright/WW Norton, 2026). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications. His honors include a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Waldman lives and teaches creative writing in New York City. He’s at work on a novel. Wendy Xu is a poet and writer, and assistant professor of writing (poetry) at The New School in NYC. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including The Past (2021), and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by New York Times Book Review, and a book on poetics entitled Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds (2025). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, she lives in Brooklyn.