Free Event: Poetry Reading With Barbara Henning

with Barbara Henning

writers dot com book design

June 25, 2025
Free 1-Day Panel

$0.00

Wednesday 7-8pm Eastern

Click the Enroll Now button below, enter your details on the Checkout page,
and reserve your spot in the course.

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Join us for a free reading with Barbara Henning. Barbara will be reading from her recently published poetry collection Girlfriend (Hanging Loose Press, 2025). The reading will conclude with a Q&A. 

Girlfriend is a celebration of women’s friendships in poetic prose, including mentors, characters and authors whose writing was important to her. One by one, the story emerges of a working-class women who loses her mother as an adolescent and becomes a mother herself, as well as a poet, a novelist and a professor. In Henning’s friendship world–the bohemian communities of Detroit and New York City–one meets artists, poets, fiction writers, literary critics, activists, mothers, yoga practitioners and teachers, among many others.

Learn more about Girlfriend and order your copy here: https://itascabooks.com/products/girlfriend-1

(Note: the website says “Preorder,” but copies are being mailed out now!) 

We will meet on Wednesday, June 25th, from 7 PM to 8 PM US Eastern Time. 

This is a free event. Please RSVP here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/fO4dHC-rRCqZu9Y910YrdA

“There’s a secret spiral at this book’s throbbing center: the mother-wound as a defining moment as well as a biographical footnote in a much larger life. Oscillating between the very tender and the very cool, Henning pays homage to the constellation of women who have touched her life. She writes, ‘I was lucky to be a writer and reader’ and after reading Girlfriend, I feel lucky, too.” — Lisa Rogalla belle indifference

“Often the lives of ordinary and extraordinary women are unseen and vanish from history. In this moving, beautiful book, Barbara Henning captures the delicate web of female friendships: intense, sometimes fragile, frequently sculpted by time and circumstance.” — Maggie Dubris, author of BrokeDown Palace

6 days left to secure early bird discount

Student Feedback for Barbara Henning:

June 25, 2025
Length: Free 1-Day Panel
Open to AllVideo-Based

Wednesday 7-8pm Eastern

$0.00

Click the Enroll Now button below, enter your details on the Checkout page,
and reserve your spot in the course.

$0.00Enroll Now

6 days left to secure early bird discount

About

Born in Detroit in 1948, Barbara Henning moved to New York City with her two children in 1983. After a few interim years in Tucson and Mysore, India, she returned to New York, presently living in Brooklyn. She is a poet who also writes prose—her most recent book is a hybrid biography of her mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), named a Michigan Notable Book of 2023; four novels, Just Like that (SD), Black Lace (SD), You Me and the Insects (SD), and Thirty Miles to Rosebud (BlazeVox); eight full length collections of poetry: Digigram (United Artists Books), A Day Like Today (Negative Capability), A Swift Passage (Quale), Cities & Memory (Chax), My Autobiography (United Artists), Detective Sentences (SD), Love Makes Thinking Dark (UA) and Smoking in the Twilight Bar (UA); and numerous chapbooks. Recently a cross country tour journal, Poets on the Road (with Maureen Owen) was published by City Point Press (2023). She is also the editor of The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (BV) and Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna).

Finally, Barb is the author of the text: Prompt Book: Experiments for Writing Poetry and Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil 2021). She is professor emerita at Long Island University in Brooklyn, and teaches for Writers.com.

For Barbara's publications, see our welcome page, Barbara's poets.org profile, and her website www.barbarehenning.com.