Please join us in Grand Ballroom I at the Hilton Portland Downtown on Thursday, October 26, from 5:10 until 6:30 pm, for the PAMLA Keynote Address featuring poet, professor, and influential literary critic Stephanie Burt. What do you do when you realize that your own deep needs equate you to artists who can’t stay alive? What can poetry do about that dilemma? What can other—less prestigious, better-known—art forms do? And what does it all have to do with company-owned comic book characters, with Elizabeth Bishop, or Terrance Hayes, or Taylor Swift?

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with nine published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other works include We Are Mermaids; Advice from the Lights; The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them; The Art of the Sonnet; Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler; The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry; Parallel Play: Poems; Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden; and Randall Jarrell and His Age. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and the Boston Review.