Aria Aber, Rachel Mannheimer, Maggie Millner & Leigh Sugar: Poetry Reading

A reading by Aria Aber, Rachel Mannheimer, Maggie Millner, and Leigh Sugar, followed by a reception/signing with books for sale courtesy of McNally Jackson.

Friday, October 10, 5pm

Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here

The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House is not currently wheelchair accessible. 

***

About the Poets:

Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, The Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She serves as the poetry editor of Amulet, as a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and works as an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Vermont. Aber divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn. Her first novel GOOD GIRL was published by Hogarth (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025.

Rachel Mannheimer was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, Earth Room, was selected by Louise Glück as the inaugural winner of the Changes Book Prize and published in 2022. She works as a literary scout, teaches poetry at Drew University, and is a contributing editor at The Yale Review.

Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of The Atlantic‘s ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.

Leigh Sugar (she/her) is a Michigan-based disabled artist. Her debut collection, FREELAND, was a finalist for both the Alice James Award and the Jake Adam York Prize, and is available as of June 2025  from Alice James Books. She also created and edited the anthology That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Poetry and Prose by Artists Teaching in Carceral Settings (New Village Press, 2023). She is represented by Ayla Zuraw-Friedland with the Frances Goldin Literary Agency.

A graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing MFA in poetry, Leigh also holds an MPA in criminal justice policy from John Jay College, and has taught workshops and ongoing classes in settings including the Poetry Foundation, Hugo House, The Institute for Justice and Opportunity, and various prisons. Leigh works for Rachel Zucker’s podcast, Commonplace, and lives in Ann Arbor, MI, with her pup Elmo. Learn more and say hi at www.leighksugar.com or on Instagram @lekasugar!