Camille Ralphs: AFTER YOU WERE, I AM (with Andrew Motion)

Camille Ralphs, editor at the Times Literary Supplement, celebrates the US publication of her debut poetry collection, After You Were, I Am! She’ll offer a reading and conversation with Andrew Motion, former UK Poet Laureate and current Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University.

The book’s three sections – rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee – obsess over individual human characters, and how our past informs (and informs on) our present. This is poetry as incantation, plea and invocation.

We’re so delighted to host these two poets side by side, to celebrate this ambitious debut.

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Order AFTER YOU WERE, I AM here

Camille Ralphs’s debut collection of poems, After You Were, I Am (UK: Faber, 2024) is published in the US this summer (McSweeney’s). She is an editor at the Times Literary Supplement and teaches at the University of Oxford.

Andrew Motion was the UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, and since 2015 has been Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent collection is Waders (McSweeney’s, 2024). He lives in Baltimore.