This meeting is presented by Mechanics’ Institute and will take place over Zoom. To receive an invitation to the meeting, please sign up at the event page linked below. You will receive an invitation and a link to Zoom the day before the event.

“It is a pleasure to think that readers of this anthology will be replicating the experience of those summer mornings and evenings in the mountains. . . . Browsing an anthology, [readers] are pollen-gathering, as the poets were doing every day as they walked in the high mountain air, wondering or watching where their next poem was going to come from.”

—Robert Hass, from the foreword

The Community of Writers celebrates fifty years of poetry with this collection of more than one hundred and forty works composed at its annual summer poetry workshop in Olympic Valley, California. Edited by workshop codirector Lisa Alvarez and introduced by longtime poetry director Robert Hass, the book is divided into three sections: place, process, and process in the place.

Why to These Rocks speaks to the special community nurtured in the valley’s inimitable setting, one that has inspired poets worldwide—many of whom developed significant bodies of award-winning work in its creative and generative atmosphere.