Pearl's Books Presents Traci Brimhall – "The Grief Artist"

Author Reading & Book Signing

Traci Brimhall, distinguished Kansas State University professor and the current poet laureate of Kansas, will read from her nonfiction debut, The Grief Artist.

The library is proud to host Pearl's Books and award-winning poet Traci Brimhall for a reading and book signing featuring her nonfiction debut, The Grief Artist.

This essay collection is a meditation about grief, death, art and how we live today in contemporary American culture. Brimhall travels around the country visiting ghost towns, haunted houses, hospice patients and devotees of the paranormal in pursuit of a collective understanding of death, dying, and grief. Brimhall examines the wreaths and tableaux of Victorian mourners, death photography and mourning fashions. She attempts to talk to the dead and visits a museum of haunted objects in the effort to experience something spiritual and uncanny. She makes blankets for hospice patients and interviews supernaturalists all while trying to understand her own grief and asks the questions, how do we grieve communally and is it even possible? Through personal story, historical research and cultural analysis Brimhall makes a case for a collective understanding of death and mourning but her book is also, like Molly McCully Brown says, a “wild catalog of ‘reasons for living,’” and Brimhall’s The Grief Artist is a fierce, soulful, and a necessary book for today’s world. 

Pearl's Books will be selling Brimhall's book and a book signing will follow the discussion.

About the Author

Traci Brimhall is a distinguished professor of creative writing at Kansas State University, as well as the 2025 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press). Her nonfiction debut, The Grief Artist, is published by Sarabande Books.

Brimhall is known for poems that marry the ordinary with the surreal. Her work has appeared widely in journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, Orion, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. Through fellowships with the National Endowment of the Arts, National Park Service, and Academy of American Poets she’s taught writing workshops in farm schools, art museums, libraries, medical communities, and the outdoors. She’s also received a Karnes Fellowships through Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart.

She is the current poet laureate of Kansas, where her initiatives have centered on uniting the state’s agricultural roots with the literary arts. Through poetry cookbooks, food-based mad lib poems, and bringing poetry to the State Fair, her literary arts advocacy seeks ways to bring the nourishment of language to all Kansans.

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