On Friday, November 10 at 12 p.m., the Gail and Francis Slattery Center for Ignatian Humanities welcomes Nick Ripatrazone to give a talk entitled “The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America.” Ripatrazone’s most recent book, The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America, is a work of literary recovery, revisiting the lives of nuns whose poetry was published and acclaimed in secular venues in the twentieth century, though they’re far less well-known than the work of priests. As Ripatrazone says, “[t]he literary creations of poetic priests like Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., and Robert Southwell, S.J. have been both a blessing and a burden—creating the sense that male clergy alone have written substantial work.” The Habit of Poetry traces a “mid-20^th century renaissance by nun poets,” which, as Ripatrazone argues, is “more than a literary footnote; it is a case study in how women negotiate tradition and individual creativity.”  

Nick Ripatrazone is the culture editor at Image Journal, a contributing editor at The Millions, and a columnist at Lit Hub. He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Esquire. He lives in Andover Township, New Jersey, with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of several books relevant to the Catholic literary tradition, most recently The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America(Fortress Press, 2023), Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan's Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age (Fortress Press, 2022), Wild Belief: Poets and Prophets in the Wilderness (Broadleaf Books, 2021), and Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Fortress Press, 2020).