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Join us for an evening with poets Susan Briante and Jennifer Scappettone to celebrate 13 Questions for the New Economy. This visionary collection, from the author of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus prize winning Defacing the Monument, weaves together selections from her four previous books with arresting new poems and visuals. Across these pages, NAFTA, industrial ruins, falling market indices, and the archives of state violence form interdependent constellations. A child is born, parents die, and an economic system continues to extract its lethal toll. “Where does the riot begin?” Briante asks. Here, in poetry that charts how too-late capitalism desecrates contemporary lives.

Susan Briante is the author of Defacing the Monument, essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In addition, she has written four books of poetry. Her work can be found in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Brooklyn Rail (among many other venues). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community-based environmental and social justice groups and a member of the Detained Project, a public facing archive that gathers the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, scholarly, and off-page arts. She is the author of six books of poetry, prose, and translation, including The Republic of Exit 43: An Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump, a cross-genre tale of two landfills, Locomotrix, translations and glosses of the great polyglot refugee poet/musicologist Amelia Rosselli, Belladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, a conversation in poetry with Lyn Hejinian and Etel Adnan, and most recently, Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism. She has also collaborated with musicians, architects, code artists, and dancers to sound counterhistories of monuments ranging from Trajan’s aqueduct to Quincy Copper Mine, and has a collaborative piece forthcoming with artist/choreographer Bárbara Foulkes at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museo Universitario del Chopo in 2026-27. She is professor and director of the Environmental Arts+Humanities Lab at the University of Chicago, where she creates forums in which to imagine more viable, tender approaches to planetary co-vulnerability.