Richard Tillinghast: Reading and Signing

Join us on July 31 at 6 PM for a discussion of Night Train to Memphis, the latest poetry collection from longtime Converse MFA faculty member Richard Tillinghast.

Get a 10% discount on the book when you RSVP on Eventbrite and present it at the bookshop register.

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About the Book

Night Train to Memphis, Richard Tillinghast’s fourteenth book of poetry, represents the culmination of a long writing journey and a return to the author’s roots. As the title poem puts it, “Every trip home is a pilgrimage into the self.” This book takes us on a multifaceted pilgrimage. The poems represent not only a voyage of self-discovery, they also offer incisive explorations of the world in which we live: the plight of America’s unhoused, who live “along the garbage-strewn freeway / in their tents and lean-tos,” Tibetan sheepherders, whose land has been brutally invaded by China. The entire volume is pervaded by an awareness of mortality. “All of us are in transit,” one poem says: ourselves, then “the river, the moon, / then the mortal stars.”

About the Author

Night Train to Memphis is the most recent of Richard Tillinghast’s many books of poetry. He has also published five works of creative nonfiction including literary travel books on Istanbul and Ireland and a critical biography of the poet Robert Lowell, with whom he studied writing at Harvard. Tillinghast has received a number of awards and honors, including grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, the Atlantic, Best American Poetry and elsewhere. A native of Memphis who has traveled widely and lived abroad, including six years in Ireland, Richard now makes his home on Hawaii’s Big Island and spends his summers in Tennessee.