Member Hosted Event – Remembering Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger with Edward Hirsch, Carlie Hoffman, and Yerra Sugarman
For Columbia’s artists, writers, and lovers of poetry, join Columbia Alumni Club of New York member and poet Carlie Hoffman (National Jewish Book Award–winning author and translator) at Poets House on Thursday, March 26, for a special literary panel alongside Edward Hirsch (MacArthur Fellow; President, Guggenheim Foundation) and Yerra Sugarman (award-winning poet; NEA Fellow). The discussion will focus on the life and work of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (1924–1942), featuring readings from Song of the Yellow Asters (World Poetry Books, 2026), translated by Hoffman, and exploring themes of language, memory, and poetic legacy.
This event is independently hosted by member Carlie Hoffman and is not an official event of, or affiliated with, the Columbia Club of New York.
About the Poets:
Edward Hirsch, a Chicago native and MacArthur Fellow, is a celebrated poet and tireless advocate for poetry. He has published ten books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son, and Stranger by Night. He has also published eight books of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, and The Heart of American Poetry. His new book, a stand-up comedy and Skokie elegy, is the memoir, My Childhood in Pieces. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, and the National Jewish Book Award. He taught at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Since 2003, he has been president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.
Carlie Hoffman is the author of three poetry collections, including When There Was Light, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Her translation from German of Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger’s Song of the Yellow Asters is out with World Poetry Books; her translations of Rose Ausländer are forthcoming. A 2025–26 Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellow, her honors include a 92NY “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, a Poets & Writers Amy Award, a New Jersey Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a NYSCA/NYFA fellowship. Her work appears in Poetry Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from Columbia University and a master’s in Literary Translation from Queens College. Hoffman is the founder of Small Orange Journal/Orange Editions and Assistant Director of the MFA program at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS).
Yerra Sugarman is the author of three volumes of poetry: Aunt Bird published by Four Way Books, which won the American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Award for General Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, as well for the New England Poetry Club’s Motton Book Prize; The Bag of Broken Glass, poems from which received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; and Forms of Gone, winner of PEN American Center’s Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She holds an MFA in Painting from Columbia University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in a community of survivors in Toronto and now lives in New York. She is currently a mentor in the low-residency MFA program at Jewish Theological Seminary. She also serves as a board member for Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, and as a co-curator for Yetzirah’s reading series.
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