New Dominion Bookshop to host author Thomas Travisano

New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and signing with author Thomas Travisano on Wednesday, March 4, from 7-8 p.m.

Travisano’s new biography of poet Elizabeth Bishop, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop, was recently published by Viking.

This event is free to attend and open to the public.

This new biography reveals just how Elizabeth Bishop learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters—a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America’s most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Travisano tells the story of the famous poet and traveler’s life.

Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians—along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture.

Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the “art of losing” that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem “One Art” was linked in equal part to an “art of finding.”

Travisano is the founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, and the principal editor of the acclaimed Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.

Travisano is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College. His work on Love Unknown was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Franklin Research Award, an NEH Summer Stipend, and by Hartwick College’s Wandersee Scholar in Residence Award.

About New Dominion Bookshop

Serving Albemarle and Central Virginia since 1924, New Dominion Bookshop is the oldest independent bookseller in Virginia. Located in Historic Downtown Charlottesville, New Dominion is a general trade bookshop that serves as the hub for readings and other literary events in the community. For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.