Reading poetry: Catharine Savage Brosman & Tamara Nicholl-Smith
About
Please join us for an evening of poetry in celebration of Catharine Savage Brosman’s latest collection, Fire in the Mind: Poems New and Selected (Mercer Press, 2026). Catharine Savage Brosman will be joined by Tamara Nicholl-Smith.
"Few contemporary poets have the range, fluency, and vision of Catharine Savage Brosman. From the precisely carved miniature of carrot or watermelon on the cutting board to the sublime ranges of the West, the sensuous Latinate culture of New Orleans, and on to the portals of the sacred, Brosman has captured our landscapes and their histories in her many books. In Fire in the Mind, we can trace her growth as a poet over many collections while also discovering something rare in the work of any poet—that she has saved many of her best poems for last. This volume is not a mere career retrospective, but a new offering as grand and classical as any before it." – James Matthew Wilson
Catharine Savage Brosman, professor emerita of French at Tulane University, is prominent in the Republic of Letters as an essayist, scholar in French and American Literature, and, foremost, poet. Her fifteen poetry collections include, most recently, Metates and Other Poems, Arm in Arm, Memory of Manaus, and Clara’s Bees. Her short fiction appeared as An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories. Brosman lives in Houston, Texas.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith is a poet and teacher whose debut collection, Saints of Sleeping and Waking, is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books. She holds an MFA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston) and was a finalist for the 2025–2027 Houston Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared on two Albuquerque bus panels and a parking meter, as well as in literary journals and anthologies including America, Kyoto Journal, Modern Age and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. She teaches generative poetry workshops through Catholic Literary Arts, serves as a contributing editor for The Better Part, and by day works in software and technology consulting.
"Few contemporary poets have the range, fluency, and vision of Catharine Savage Brosman. From the precisely carved miniature of carrot or watermelon on the cutting board to the sublime ranges of the West, the sensuous Latinate culture of New Orleans, and on to the portals of the sacred, Brosman has captured our landscapes and their histories in her many books. In Fire in the Mind, we can trace her growth as a poet over many collections while also discovering something rare in the work of any poet—that she has saved many of her best poems for last. This volume is not a mere career retrospective, but a new offering as grand and classical as any before it." – James Matthew Wilson
Catharine Savage Brosman, professor emerita of French at Tulane University, is prominent in the Republic of Letters as an essayist, scholar in French and American Literature, and, foremost, poet. Her fifteen poetry collections include, most recently, Metates and Other Poems, Arm in Arm, Memory of Manaus, and Clara’s Bees. Her short fiction appeared as An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories. Brosman lives in Houston, Texas.
Tamara Nicholl-Smith is a poet and teacher whose debut collection, Saints of Sleeping and Waking, is forthcoming from Wiseblood Books. She holds an MFA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston) and was a finalist for the 2025–2027 Houston Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared on two Albuquerque bus panels and a parking meter, as well as in literary journals and anthologies including America, Kyoto Journal, Modern Age and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. She teaches generative poetry workshops through Catholic Literary Arts, serves as a contributing editor for The Better Part, and by day works in software and technology consulting.
