Inprint and Congregation Emanu El proudly present My Childhood in Pieces: Edward Hirsch in Conversation with Leah Lax

ABOUT THE PROGRAM: A lively reading by Edward Hirsch from his touching memoir My Childhood in Pieces at 7 pm will be followed by a conversation with Houston writer Leah Lax and a book sale and signing. Brazos Bookstore will be on-site to sell books. The event is free and open to the public, registration via free tickets is required.

EDWARD HIRSCH, a MacArthur Fellow, has published nine books of poetry, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, Wild Gratitude, Night Parade, and Gabriel: A Poem, a book-length elegy for his son. He has also published seven volumes of prose, among them How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, The Heart of American Poetry, published by the Library of America, and 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. He has received numerous prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. A longtime teacher at Wayne State University and the University of Houston Creative Writing Program (UH CWP), Hirsch is currently president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Brooklyn.

In his latest book My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy,  dark comic microbursts of prose deliver a whole childhood, at the hands of an aspiring middle-class Jewish family whose hard-boiled American values and wit were the forge of a poet’s coming-of-age.

“My grandparents taught me to write my sins on paper and cast them into the water. . . . They didn’t expect an entire book,” Hirsch says in the “prologue” to this glorious festival of knife-sharp observations. In microchapters—sometimes only a single scathing sentence long—with titles like “Call to Breakfast,” “Pay Cash,” “The Sorrow of Manly Sports,” and “Aristotle on Lawrence Avenue,” Eddie’s gambling father, Ruby, son of a white metal smelter, schools him and his sister in blackjack; Eddie’s mom bangs pots to wake the kids to a breakfast of cold cereal; Uncle Bob, in the collection business, is heard threatening people on the phone; and nobody suffers fools. In this household, Eddie learned to jab with his left and cross with his right, never to kid a kidder, and how to sneak out at night.

Affectionate, deadpan, and exuberant, steeped in Yiddishkeit and Midwestern practicality, Hirsch’s laugh-and-cry performance animates a heartbreaking odyssey, from the cradle to the day he leaves home, armed with sorrow and a huge store of poetic wit.

LEAH LAX is a graduate of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, where she took five seminars in poetry literature with Edward Hirsch, although she wasn’t majoring in poetry. Leah then began her career as a librettist for Houston Grand Opera. The Refuge with Christopher Theofanidis was broadcast nationally on NPR and reviewed in the New York Times. Her memoir Uncovered followed, the first gay memoir ever out of the Jewish ultraorthodox world. Uncovered received numerous awards and was translated into Arabic. Together with composer Lori Laitman, they set the story as a chamber opera that debuted in New York in 2022.  Leah’s book Not From Here: the Song of America came out in 2023, the work closest to her heart, about listening to immigrants tell their journey stories and coming to better understand who she is as an American and as a Jew. Along the way, Leah was collaborating with Houston composer Mark Buller. Austin chorus Conspirare’s album of their work – Advena: Liturgies for a Broken World – received a 2025 Grammy nomination. Their Mass In Exile will soon have its New York debut in Carnegie Hall. Her most recent effort is Refuge, a play about a Nigerian-American family exploring their immigrant past, in informal collaboration with Ensemble Theater.