Jersey City Poet Laureate Emeritus Ann E. Wallace and Art House Productions present:
Book Celebration for Keeping Room by Ann E. Wallace
Friday, March 13, 2026 at 7:30PM
Free Event - RSVP Required
Keeping Room is Ann E. Wallace’s third full-length poetry collection. The evening will feature a reading from Keeping Room, with a discussion led by Jayne Freeman, followed by a book signing and reception. Books will also be available for purchase and signing at the event.
Keeping Room is an intimate collection grounded in familial spaces of home and garden. The poems grapple with the nature of survival, and the survival of nature, as experienced by a woman living with disability and chronic illness in an overdeveloped city with a shrinking natural footprint. The collection spools from the pain of chronic illness and grief, to the loss of political freedoms, to the disrupted urban (and global) landscape. However, despite despair and uncertainty, the poems reach for hope, love, and strength in the unlikely places where they may be found, with a steady turn toward nature and healing, or often, healing through nature, throughout the collection.
Ann E. Wallace’s third collection, Keeping Room pulls together several threads of her work--including her 2024 collection Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID's Long Haul (Kelsay Books), her work as a Long COVID patient and illness advocate, as well as her podcast The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants for the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. Wallace served as the 2023-24 Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey. As a long-time survivor of ovarian cancer, a woman with multiple sclerosis, and one of the nation's first Long Covid patients, she has lived and written through illness for more than thirty years. Pain, disability, and disease—as well as hope and resilience—have inspired and informed her work as a poet, memoirist, patient advocate, and scholar. She is Professor of English at New Jersey City University.
FREE RSVP
Friday, March 13, 2026
Doors: 7:00 PM / Reading: 7:30 PM
Art House Productions
345 Marin Boulevard, Jersey City, NJ
Directions:
https://www.arthouseproductions.org/pages/directions
Parking Options:
Street parking where available.
https://spothero.com/
Public Transportation:
Transitapp.com
www.transitapp.com