Jeff Porter in conversation with Ann Hood in Iowa City

Jeff Porter in conversation with Ann Hood

Please join us for a special book launch event for Planet Clare: Suite for Cello and Sad-Eyed Lovers with its author Jeff Porter, featuring a reading and conversation with novelist Ann Hood.

To join this virtual event, register here.

Planet Claire is the story of the untimely death of the author’s wife and his candid account of the following year of madness and grief. As his life unravels, Porter analyzes his sadness with growing interest. He talks to Claire as if to evoke a presence, to mark a space for memory. He reports on his daily walks and shares observations of life’s sadness, while reminiscing about various moments in their life together. Like Orpheus, the author searches for a lost love, and what he finds is not the dog of doom but flashes of an intimate symmetry that brighten the darkest places of sorrow. Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter, says of the book,  “Jeff Porter indelibly conjures his lost, beloved Claire in a ‘spiral galaxy’ of memory, while offering the story of a delicious marriage in prose that is elegiac but also gorgeous, funny, and endearingly modest.” Planet Clare is forthcoming from Gracie Belle/Akashic Books on January 5, 2021.

Jeff Porter is the author of Lost Sound: The Forgotten Art of Radio Storytelling, the memoir Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, and coeditor of Understanding the Essay. His essays and articles have appeared in several magazines and literary reviews, including the Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Shenandoah, Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Wilson Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and the Seneca Review. He loves cameras, dogs, and guitars—though not in that order. He lives in Iowa City and teaches English at the University of Iowa.

He will be joined in conversation by Ann Hood, the author of the best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most, The Obituary Writer, Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, The Red Thread, and The Knitting Circle, as well as the memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and chosen as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly. She has won two Pushcart Prizes as well as a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, two Best American Food Writing Awards, and a Best American Travel Writing award. A regular contributor to the New York Times, Hood’s short stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including Ploughshares, Tin House, Traveler, Bon Appetit, O, More, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and others. Hood is also the author of books for children, including the middle-grade novels She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah) and How I Saved My Father (And Ruined Everything Else), and the ten-book Treasure Chest series. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City, and is married to the writer Michael Ruhlman.

Categories: Literary & Books