Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 14, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Njegoš Endowment, the East Central European Center, and the Harriman Institute for a conversation with Rivka R. Galchen and Aleksandar Hemon about his first collection of poetry, Godspotting, moderated by Aleksandar Bošković.
Godspotting ponders and proclaims what it means to live, die, and survive in a world that “doesn’t love any of us.” Considering the fragility and utterly complicated nature of life, Aleksandar Hemon’s contemplation of human mortality shifts between surrendering to the disappearing act of death and accepting that this cruel world is still home to beautiful things. Hemon acknowledges the difficulty of living in the present as he interrogates the “shape and form” of joy, meandering through tender and complex memories of family members, his childhood and youth, and valued moments that must end. This collection challenges religious understandings of death and what follows, as it teeters from curiosity to despair at one’s inevitable demise to radical acceptance.
Aleksandar Hemon has published fiction and nonfiction extensively, most recently the novel The World and All That It Holds (MCD/FSG 2023), which has been translated in over a dozen languages. His poetry has been published in The New Yorker, Freeman’s, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Brick, The Common, and was featured on the poetry podcast Slowdown. As a screenwriter, Hemon worked on the Netflix show Sense8 and Lana Wachowski’s The Matrix Resurrections. He produces music and video, and DJs as Cielo Hemon. Godspotting (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) is his first collection of poetry. Hemon is Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.
Rivka Galchen is an award-winning novelist as well as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, where she writes about rats, birds, telescopes and other fascinations. In 2010, she was named to The New Yorker’s list of 20 Writers Under 40. She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, The Berlin Prize and The William J Saroyan International Prize in Fiction, and her work has been widely anthologized. Galchen also holds an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
