Bruce Snider: Book Launch for BLOOD HARMONY (with James Arthur)

Bird in Hand invites you to the book launch for Bruce Snider and his newest collection, Blood Harmony!

Snider is an accomplished author of 4 poetry collections and a faculty member in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He's known for his originality, his musicality, his thoughtful, nuanced depictions of family relationships-- and more generally his writing and teaching that helps students of all kinds connect deeply with poetry. This latest collection tells the story of two brothers torn apart by opioid addiction in a timely, and also highly specific, tale of selfishness and sacrifice, guilt and resentment, hope and despair.

We hope you'll join us to hear more from the collection as Bruce Snider and fellow Baltimore-based poet James Arthur read alongside one another.

Order BLOOD HARMONY here

Bruce Snider is the author of four poetry collections, Blood Harmony (University of Wisconsin Press, Fall 2025), Fruit, (University of Wisconsin Press, Spring 2020); Paradise, Indiana (Pleiades Press, 2013); and The Year We Studied Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). His poems and essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, Threepenny Review, UTNE, and ZYZZYVA, among others. His awards include a 2023 NEA fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Jenny McKean Writer-in-Washington award, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, as well residencies from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Amy Clampitt House, the James Merrill House, VCCA, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Canadian-American poet James Arthur is the author of The Suicide’s Son (Véhicule Press 2019) and Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.) His poems have also appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The London Review of Books. He has received the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a Visiting Fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. Arthur lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.