Michael Waters and Mihaela Moscaliuc

Pagan Sky (Poems 2000 – 2025) and Heartmoor The poets will read from their new releases and then be in conversation with one another. This is a hybrid event, taking place in person at Writers & Books and online via Zoom. All registrants will receive a Zoom link in the registration confirmation email that is automatically sent to your email after checkout. Pagan Sky by Michael Waters: In these richly textured poems—crafted with taut clarity and consummate skill—Waters confronts the immutable presence of death by reveling in sensual pleasure and spiritual daring. Each poem unfolds as a compelling narrative, sharpened by precise diction and lifted by lyrical grace and musical phrasing. Waters’ range is expansive, moving across geographies from Brooklyn to Romania, from the Dominican Republic to Greece, all while engaging in urgent political realities such as AIDS, Black Lives Matter, and authoritarian rule. He also draws on a vibrant cultural lineage that includes Caravaggio, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cesare Pavese, and Balthus. Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000–2025 presents a body of work that affirms Michael Waters as a singular and enduring voice in American poetry and as an artist whose poems continue to deepen, resonate, and enrich his remarkable literary legacy. Heartmoor by Mihaela Moscaliuc: Informed by the poet’s coming of age during and immediately following Nicolae Ceaușescu’s repressive regime in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc’s newest collection, Heartmoor, is a lush, formally diverse collection that explores what moors and unmoors us psychologically, culturally, and spiritually. These poems reflect on in-betweenness, authoritarianism, cruelty, and complicity while still holding space for joy, wonder, and care. The legacy of Decree 770—Romania’s notorious anti-abortion law—lingers in this collection’s engagement with women’s bodies and reproductive autonomy. Heartmoor moves through the textures of daily life—mushrooms, medicinal herbs, chocolate, family, death—and into the charged, liminal spaces where the political and personal converge. Again and again, these poems remind us that touch and connection, rituals, acts of kindness and intimacy, might be, after all, the only kind of home to which we can moor our hearts, regardless of which country we inhabit—or which inhabits us. Michael Waters’ recent books include Pagan Sky: New and Selected Poems 2000-2025 (BOA Editions, 2026), Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), The Bicycle and the Soul: Prose on Poetry (Tiger Bark Press, 2024), and several co-edited (with Mihaela Moscaliuc) anthologies, including Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems (Knopf, 2025) and Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry. Recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, he lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ. Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Heartmoor (Alice James Books, August 2026), Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Michael Waters) of Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems (Knopf, 2025) and Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). Moscaliuc is the recipient of a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart prizes (’24, ’25), two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania. She has received residency fellowships from Hawthornden Foundation (Italy), Yaddo, MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Rockvale Writers’ Colony, Château de Lavigny (Switzerland), and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. She is a graduate program director and professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and a former poetry & translation faculty in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Drew University (New Jersey). Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation!