Sep 10th 2026

Poetry & Archival Discovery: An Author Talk with Elizabeth Hoover & Noa Micaela Fields

@ Gerber/Hart Library & Archives

6500 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60626

Opening Thursday, September 10th, from 6:30PM - 8:30PM

Join us at Gerber/Hart on Thursday, September 10th, for an author talk with Elizabeth Hoover and Noa Micaela Fields discussing poetry and archival discovery. Elizabeth will be reading from the archive is all in present tense, her book-length love poem to queer archiving practices, and her new project based on archival research about the pioneering queer photographer and Nazi resister Claude Cahun. Noa will be reading from her 2026 book E, mischievous mishearings and homophonic translations that remix a classic of 20th Century American poetry. Copies of both books will be available for sale from Women & Children First Books.

About the Books:

A love letter to archives,  the archive is all in present tense  is a series of poems that follows a researcher who is exploring a fantastical, limitless archive. There she keeps encountering objects from her past, as well as developing a relationship with a gender-bending archivist who leads her through memories of her first love, investigations into her family’s history, and into a more complex understanding of the nature of memory–both official and unofficial.
E (2026, Nightboat Books, cover art by Sofia Moreno):  Like a game of telephone gone haywire, these mischievous mishearings and homophonic translations remix a classic of 20th Century American poetry. C’mon, take the E pill (is it estrogen? ecstasy? something else entirely?). E practices mishearing as a bodily reworking of language alongside the poet’s hormonal transition, stretching the upper limits of homophonic translation to unleash the unexpected queer resonances of Louis Zukofsky’s “A.” E alchemizes mishearing into a political possibility of glitching, noncompliance, and protest. Not a translation, but maximally trans, mishearing transmutes language to generate new possibilities: how hormones change the body; how relationships evolve, multiply, and implode over time.

About the Authors:

Elizabeth Hoover is the author of the archive is all in present tense, winner of the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize. She received the Pat Holt Prize for Critical Art Writing from Lambda Literary  and has published creative nonfiction in  the North American Review, the Southeast Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is an assistant professor of English at Webster University in Saint Louis where she teaches such classes as Genderqueer Frankenstein, Archival Poetics and LGBTQ+ Literature.  www.ehooverink.com

Noa Micaela Fields (photo by Eva Geczy): Noa Micaela Fields is an echodeviant enjambment queen—translation: trans poet with hearing aids. She is the author of E (Nightboat Books, 2026), an alter-book embracing mishearing as a relational ritual of transformation. Beyond the page, her poems take on embodied form in collaborative performance remixes; such ethereal access mischief has transpired at Artists Space, Elastic Arts, Poetry Project Poetry Foundation, Palais de Tokyo, Beyond Baroque, Podlasie Club, No Nation, and elsewhere. Born in California, Fields lives in Chicago, where she frequently organizes readings and also edits poetry for Chrysalis, a literary magazine by and for trans youth. www.doyounoapoet.com

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