Poetry & Drama: A Gothic Gathering

Join us at Lookingglass Theatre for a discussion after the matinee performance of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. When Lord Byron, Percy Byshhe Shelley, Dr. John Polidori, and Mary Wollstonecraft gathered in a chateau to spin “ghost stories,” no one could have known we’d still be haunted two hundred years later. How did this critical mass of poetic minds come together? How did their work influence each other and shake the literary world, and what is their legacy?

Ed Roberson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including To See the Earth Before the End of the World (2010), which was a runner up for the Los Angeles Times Poetry Award; The New Wing of the Labyrinth (2009); City Eclogue (2006); Atmosphere Conditions (1999), which was chosen by Nathaniel Mackey for the National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Award. Roberson’s honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2016, the Lila Wallace Writers’ Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, and the 2016 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. His work has been included in Best American Poetry.

Alexis Chema is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where she focuses on Romanticism. Recently she taught courses on the relationship between Mary Shelley and her mother, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frankenstein and its adaptations in print, film, and on stage. As a World Monuments Fund Fellow she spent a summer at Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's ancestral home, and wrote a new tour of the estate. She is currently writing about revenge in the political thought of Mary and Percy Shelley.

Jonathan Gross teaches in the Department of English at DePaul University. His course offerings include classes on Romantic poetry, the Godwins and the Shelleys, Lord Byron, and the Romantic Ballad. He is Joint-President of the International Association of Byron Societies and published an essay in The Common Review, "The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein."