Alice Quinn, former editor at Alfred A Knopf and The New Yorker, Executive Director of the Poetry Society for almost two decades, beloved adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts for thirty-five years, with Victoria Wilson and Foster Hirsch talks about her large, exuberant life as a devoted reader-editor; about her fifteen years at Knopf, first as assistant to the legendary, singular, adored, advertising genius Nina Bourne (“no one wants irony in the desert, lovey”), then as editor of Deborah Eisenberg, Jane Smiley, Ann Arensberg,  Steven Millhauser, and Adrienne Kennedy along with seminal writers on American folk art. Quinn talks about the founding of the Knopf Poetry Series and furthering the major careers of  Amy Clampitt, Edward Hirsch, Marie Ponsot, Sharon Olds, and many more; about being hired by Mr. Shawn of The New Yorker as an editor at the magazine and becoming in Robert Gottlieb’s tenure and that of Tina Brown and David Remnick poetry editor, as well, one of the most influential positions in the world of poetry,  publishing more than two thousand poems by (among hundreds of others) Joseph Brodsky, Louise Glück, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Zbigniew Herbert, Elizabeth Alexander, and Eavan Boland.

Quinn discusses her almost twenty years as head of the Poetry Society, producing more than 700 programs, many of them innovative, acclaimed multi-arts programs with actors, musicians and artists celebrating  poetry in partnerships with major cultural organizations including The New York Botanical Garden, the Los Angeles Public Library, and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, as well as advancing the restorative and spirit-saving Poetry-in-Motion series for transit systems across the country, chief among them, New York City.  

Quinn, Wilson and Hirsch discuss the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box, Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments by Elizabeth Bishop (“A stupendous event.” ―John Ashbery) as well as her poetry anthology, Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (“Quinn’s collection covers remarkable ground . . .” —Clare Bucknell, The New Yorker).

In this inspiring, endearing, rousing conversation, Alice Quinn enchants, teaches, informs and weaves a spell through the power of language and passion to bewitch and transform space and time.