Acts of Love and Lyricism: Spencer Reece & Danielle Chapman

Spencer Reece and Danielle Chapman read from their latest poetry collections, both of which testify to being called to love through lives of faith and poetry. Reece's Acts regales readers with tender, and often hilarious, tales of a queer Episcopal priest in Spain, and a devoted son at his mother's bedside in Old Lyme, CT. In Boxed Juice Chapman's speakers sing of the joys and the absurdities of raising small children against the backdrop of a devastating illness. Both books seek music, meaning, humor, and even rapture, in the midst of suffering and strangeness.

Free and open to the public.

This event is sponsored by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music Literature & Spirituality Program.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker bios:

Danielle Chapman is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Poetry International and elsewhere. Delinquent Palaces, released by Northwestern University Press in April 2015, is her debut collection of poems. For several years, Danielle served as the director of literary arts and events for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, where she created programs to serve Chicago’s writers, publishers, and literary community. She was also a consulting editor for The Poetry Foundation. Danielle lives in Hamden, CT, with her husband, Christian Wiman, and their twin daughters.

Canon and Rector Father Spencer Reece of St. Paul's Wickford, Rhode Island, graduated from Wesleyan University where he majored in English Literature and studied “verse-writing” with Annie Dillard.  Reece went on to York University in the United Kingdom and studied the poetry of George Herbert, then Harvard Divinity to earn a degree in Theology.  He then worked for Brooks Brothers for 12 years in sales and management.  A Guggenheim Fellow, long-listed for the National Book Award, Reece’s first manuscript, The Clerk’s Tale, was selected by Louise Glück. Reece returned to seminary at Berkeley, Yale, in mid-life and was ordained to the priesthood in Madrid, Spain, on October 2^nd of 2011. He was awarded a Fulbright to teach poetry at Our Little Roses in San Pedro, Honduras, where he lived and worked with the abandoned girls at the orphanage.  The work was made into an award-winning film, Voices Beyond the Wall: 12 Love Poems from the Murder Capital of the World.  He then moved to Madrid and assisted the Episcopal Bishop of Spain for a decade. During this time he created an author series called The Unamuno Author Series.  His third book of poems Acts was published by FSG in May of  2024.