Edward Hirsch + Philip Schultz: My Childhood in Pieces

Join us for an in-person event with notable writer Edward Hirsch for the launch of his new memoir My Childhood in Pieces. Joining Edward in conversation is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Schultz. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of My Childhood in Pieces here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by 5/19 to request.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

From the award-winning poet, dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet's coming-of-age.

“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of an iron smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.

Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

Photo credit: Garrett Hongo

Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine previous books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. He has also published seven books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. A longtime teacher, at Wayne State University and in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, Hirsch is now president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Philip Schultz’s most recent memoir is Comforts of the Abyss. His new poetry collection, Enormous Morning, will be out next winter, 2026. Failure won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He’s the founder and director of The Writers Studio, a private school for creative writing started in 1987.