Please join Summer Brenner and Vincent Katz at Clio’s on Sunday, June 15th to explore personal narrative, historical legacy, and the transformative power of poetry.

Brenner, a storyteller whose work spans memoir, fiction, and poetry, takes a multilayered approach to language—one that seamlessly merges the personal with the political and the intimate with the global. In her poetry, she addresses her own experiences alongside broader, geopolitical concerns; in her fiction, she crafts narratives that resonate with emotional and intellectual depth. Brenner's work conveys the intricacies of the human condition with humor and wisdom in ways that are both personal and expansive.

Katz, known for his compelling translations of ancient Greek and Roman poets along with his connections to New York School, Beat, and Black Mountain school writers, brings a nuanced understanding of classical forms to his own verse, crafting work that reflects the timelessness of human emotion and the immediacy of modern artistic expression. His writings on visual art further deepen this engagement with cross-temporal dialogues between words and images.

In a conversation that navigates the shoals between the ancient and the contemporary, the personal and the collective, they will discuss the power of language to illuminate the past and engage the present. Their meeting at Clio's is a renewal of a relationship that began thirty years ago and has unfolded since then in an epistolary fashion.

Summer Brenner grew up in Georgia before migrating west, first to New Mexico and then to the Bay Area, where she has been a long-time resident. She is the author of over a dozen works that include short stories and novellas from Coffee House Press, Red Hen, and Spuyten Duyvil; poetry from The Figures; crime novels from Gallimard série noire and PM Press; and the occasional essay, most notably in Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City. She has also written social-justice fiction for youth, including Oakland Tales: Lost Secrets of The Town, widely used and theatrically produced in local schools and honored by the California Teachers Association, the City of Oakland, and the Oakland Heritage Alliance.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and critic. He is the author of the poetry collection Daffodil, recently out from Alfred A. Knopf, as well as the collections Broadway for Paul, Southness, and Swimming Home, among others. He collaborated with Anne Waldman on the book-length poem Fantastic Caryatids and with Andrei Codrescu on A Possible Epic of Care. Katz is the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, translations of the Roman love poet, and is currently translating the Works and Days and the Theogony of the ancient Greek poet Hesiod. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in New York City.

From a Secret Place: the Transformative Power of Poetry