Location: Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street, Princeton

Erica Lehrer, poet, and Dr. Sam Wang, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Neuroscience at Princeton University, will introduce and read from Lehrer’s collection of poems Dancing with Ataxia. Please join us.

Lehrer came to poetry by means of a happy accident in mid-life when a fiction class was oversubscribed and a place in a poetry workshop was offered as a substitute. Her life turned upside down when she was diagnosed with Multiple System Atrophy, a rare neurodegenerative disease that is grouped with other neurological conditions in the general category of “ataxia”. She considers herself fortunate that poetry came into her life concurrently with the onset of her illness. Her work has appeared in literary journals. Recently she was a featured poet at the Houston Poetry Festival in October 2011 and the recipient of the 2012 W.D. Snodgrass Fellowship.

Prof. Wang is the “head honcho” of a research team at the Neuroscience Institute that studies the cerebellum.  He and his team were deeply moved by the words of Lehrer’s poems, some of which address the devastating losses incurred when the normal functioning of her cerebellum was disrupted.  It is hoped that these poems increase awareness of the importance of the work undertaken by his team and serve as a motivational reference point for current and future researchers in the area.

For more information regarding Erica Lehrer or Dancing with Ataxia, please visit: www.ericalehrer.com. For more information regarding the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, please visit: http://neuroscience.princeton.edu. For more information regarding the National Ataxia Foundation, please visit: http://www.ataxia.org

Profits from the sale of Dancing with Ataxia will be donated to Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute and towards medical research via the National Ataxia Foundation.