On Wednesday October 16th, the 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of the acclaimed Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin, 2023), Robyn Schiff, read her recent work in Tishman Lecture Hall. The event was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College.
Robyn Schiff is the author of four poetry collections: Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin, 2023), winner of the 2024 Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; A Woman of Property (Penguin, 2016), a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker and the Chicago Tribune; Revolver (University of Iowa Press, 2008), a PEN/USA Award finalist; and Worth (University of Iowa Press, 2002). She co-edits the independent small press Canarium Books and was the recipient of the 2023 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a Professor at the University of Chicago where she directs the creative writing program.
An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by Director of Poetry at Bennington, Michael Dumanis, who has known Schiff for twenty-seven years, since their time at Iowa Writers Workshop. According to the blurb of Information Desk by the Washington Post, “Among the year’s highlights…groundbreaking, epic…Like visitors exiting the Met’s galleries, readers will emerge from Information Desk bedazzled by the transformative horizons of art,” and by the New York Review of Books, “An effluvial rush of memory, desire, data, and metaphor…It’s bracing to encounter a mind so voracious, so unapologetic in its intelligence.”
Schiff started reading from Information Desk—which is inspired by her time working at the information desk of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art—in the middle of the book, ending with the beginning. “This book is really about time … Every syllable is a second going by,” she said, before starting the reading that lasted for about forty minutes. According to the publisher, Penguin Random House, “Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfarers with riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns, including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas, and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses—parasitic wasps—in desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy. Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey through artifice and the natural world.” “It took me a long time to write this book…I started writing [this book] during the election season…the one before the latest,” Schiff said before reading the beginning poem.
Additionally, students were invited to attend two additional events featuring Schiff: first, a craft talk on the same day at 3pm in CAPA Symposium, “Mapping Memory: Drawing on the Domestic with Robyn Schiff” and second, a Q&A on Thursday, October 17th at 12:30pm in EAC-1, “Robyn Schiff in Conversation with Michael Dumanis.”
The reading was followed by a book signing. The copies of Information Desk were sold in Tishman.
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