The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Richard Hoffman for a reading from two New and Selected collection, Each Child a Disappearance and Mundus et Infans. Richard is joined in conversation by poet Richard Smith.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Richard Hoffman is the author of seven books of poetry: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, winner of The Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Book Award from The New England Poetry Club; Emblem; Noon until Night, which received the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry; People Once Real; and his most recent, Each Child a Disappearance: New & Selected Poems, and Mundus et Infans: Selected Suites, Sequences, & Series. His other books include the memoirs, Half the House and Love & Fury; Interference and Other Stories, and the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Nonfiction Editor of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
Richard Smith’s first book, Not a Soul but Us, is a narrative in sonnets about the plague pandemic in mid-14th-century England. It won the 2021 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize and was released in 2022 by Bauhan Publishing. Bauhan also recently published his second book, Beyond Where Words Can Go, about a group of Tudor-era monks before, during, and after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Richard is a psychologist with a clinical practice in Washington, D.C.
About Each Child a Disappearance
Spanning the years 1972–2025, Each Child a Disappearance gathers Hoffman’s most celebrated poems alongside new and previously uncollected work. This volume includes selections from Without Paradise; Gold Star Road; Emblem; Noon until Night; and People Once Real as well as powerful new poems confronting grief, violence, ecological collapse, democracy’s fragility, and the obligations of witness. Many of Hoffman’s most widely taught and anthologized poems appear here, along with late work of profound spiritual and emotional clarity.
About Mundus et Infans
Where the first volume presents individual poems, Mundus et Infans collects Hoffman’s long-form suites, sequences, and serial poems—book-length arcs of thought and feeling in which he explores myth, memory, art, philosophy, and history at scale. These extended works map the structures beneath experience: the stories we inherit, the archetypes we repeat, and the imaginative frameworks through which we make meaning. Together they offer a sustained meditation on childhood, catastrophe, and the lifelong labor of consciousness.
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