Join us for an evening with Chelsea Woodard as she takes us on an adventure, exploring natural and mythic landscapes, meditating on the concept of "home."
At the Lepidopterist’s House invites the reader to explore natural and mythic landscapes, examine the interiors of marriage and the domestic, and consider the bodies of animals as vessels of memory and imagination. At times through the lens of scientific observation or artistic rendering, at others through lived experience, the speakers of these poems face separation from places and people, gathering real and remembered artifacts as a means of better understanding our tumultuous world. This collection is a meditation on the ways one can lose and reimagine home, on what it means to love and to grieve, to find freedom and lightness among the weight of the material and the human.
Chelsea Woodard’s third collection, At the Lepidopterist’s House, won the 2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was released from Southern Indiana Review Press in October, 2023. She is also the author of the collections Solitary Bee (Measure Press, 2016) and Vellum (Able Muse Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Southwest Review, 32 Poems, River Styx, and other journals, and is included in the forthcoming anthology, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy
(Black Lawrence Press, 2024). She is the recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
