Emily Wilson, Seattle Arts & Lectures: Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 7:30 pm

Streamed to you live from Town Hall in Seattle!

The culmination of a decade of intense engagement with antiquity’s most surpassingly beautiful and emotionally complex poetry, Emily Wilson’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey give us a complete Homer for our generation.

Q&A with Dujie Tahat.

REGISTER HERE by May 10.

This series is brought to the community through the support of Friends of the Lopez Island Library.

When Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey appeared in 2017—revealing the ancient poem in a contemporary idiom that was “fresh, unpretentious and lean” (Madeline Miller, Washington Post)—critics lauded it as “a revelation” (Susan Chira, New York Times) and “a cultural landmark” (Charlotte Higgins, Guardian) that would forever change how Homer is read in English. Now Wilson has returned with an equally revelatory translation of Homer’s other great epic—the most revered war poem of all time.

The Iliad roars with the clamor of arms, the bellowing boasts of victors, the fury and grief of loss, and the anguished cries of dying men. It sings, too, of the sublime magnitude of the world—the fierce beauty of nature and the gods’ grand schemes beyond the ken of mortals. In Wilson’s hands, this thrilling, magical, and often horrifying tale now gallops at a pace befitting its legendary battle scenes, in crisp but resonant language that evokes the poem’s deep pathos and reveals palpably real, even “complicated,” characters—both human and divine.

Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Philadelphia with her family and pets.

Follow Professor Wilson on Substack @EmilyRCWilson. Professor Wilson frequently posts about Homer and translation.

Dujie Tahat is the fifth Civic poet and author of the full-length poetry collection Shibboleth (Fonograf 2027) as well as three poetry chapbooks: Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection; and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest and the Center for Book Arts honoree. Dujie has earned fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, Kundiman, National Book Critics Circle, the Poetry Foundation, and others. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast.