In the Rhododendrons: Heather Christle in conversation with Jericho Brown

Acclaimed poet and author of The Crying Book Heather Christle joins us to discuss her new book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf. This deeply moving, immersive, and lyrical hybrid memoir is about her mother, Woolf, and the transformative power of writing. She’ll be in conversation with Jericho Brown. Registration is requested, not required.

This event will take place in the Decatur Library Auditorium, on the Ground Floor of Decatur Library. Please park on the lower level of the parking garage and enter through those doors. You may also enter through the main level of the library and take the elevators to "G." Doors and elevators will be unlocked at 6:30.

About the Book:

When Heather Christle realizes that she, her mother, and Virginia Woolf share a traumatic history, she begins to rewrite and intertwine each of their stories, in search of a more hopeful narrative and a future she can live with. On a recent visit to London’s Kew Gardens, Christle’s mother revealed details of a painful story from her past that took place there, under circumstances that strangely paralleled Heather’s own sexual assault during a visit to London as a teenager. Her private, British mother’s revelation—a rare burst of vulnerability in their strained relationship—propels Christle down a deep and destabilizing rabbit hole of investigation, as she both reads and wanders the streets of her mother’s past, peeling back the layers of family mythologies, England’s sanctioned historical narratives, and her own buried memories. Over the course of several trips to London, with and without her mother, she visits her family’s “birthday hill” in Kew Gardens, the now-public homes of the Bloomsbury set, the archives of the British Library, and the backyard garden where Woolf wrote her final sentence. All the while, she finds that Woolf and her writings not only constantly seem to connect and overlap with her mother’s story, but also that the author becomes a kind of vital intermediary: a sometimes confidante, sometimes mentor, sometimes distancing lens through which Christle can safely observe her mother and their experiences. Wide-ranging and prismatic, the fruit of an insatiably curious, delightfully brilliant mind, In the Rhododendrons is part memoir, part biography of Virginia Woolf, part reckoning with the things we cannot change and the ways we can completely transform, if we dare. This utterly original book will stir readers into new ways of seeing their own lives.

About the Author:

Heather Christle is an Associate Professor in Emory’s Creative Writing Program and the author of Paper Crown (Wesleyan, 2025); In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin Books, 2025); The Crying Book (Catapult, 2019), which won the Georgia Book Award for memoir; Heliopause (Wesleyan, 2015); What is Amazing (Wesleyan, 2012); The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009); and The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award and was adapted into a ballet. Her writing has also appeared in The Believer, Elle, The Guardian, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry, among others.

About the Conversation Partner:

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.