Live Oak, With Moss (Abrams, 2019) book launch celebration featuring New York Times best-selling and Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator, Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) in conversation with Whitman scholar, Dr. Karen Karbiener (New York University), Tuesday, October 15, 4-6pm in the East Rotunda of UCLA’s Powell Library. This event is free and open to the public. Talk will be followed by Q&A and book signing; refreshments served.

More about Live Oak, With Moss
As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book that were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. Titled “Live Oak, With Moss,” the poems were his most adventurous explorations of same-sex love, composed decades before the word “homosexual” came into use. These revolutionary poems were never published by Whitman and have remained unknown to the general public—until now.

New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Award–winning illustrator Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) offers a provocative visual narrative of “Live Oak, With Moss” while Whitman scholar, Dr. Karen Karbiener reconstructs the story of the poems’ creation and destruction. Whitman’s reassembled, reinterpreted Live Oak, With Moss (Abrams, 2019) serves as a source of inspiration and a cause for celebration.

This event is co-sponsored by UCLA Writing Programs, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, UCLA Library, Department of English, and the LGBTQ Studies Program, and is part of Whitmania, the west coast’s largest celebration of Walt Whitman’s bicentennial in 2019, made possible with support from UCLA Arts Initiative, UCLA Humanities, and the Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs.

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