An Illustrated Lecture by Writer A. N. Devers
Date: Thursday, October 2nd
Time: 8pm
Admission: $8 ( Tickets Here )
Location: Morbid Anatomy Museum, 424 A Third Avenue, 11215 Brooklyn NY

Since his death on October 7, 1849 and his hasty funeral the next day, Edgar Allan Poe has not rested. Although he is buried in Baltimore, his body has been in a near perpetual state of being memorialized since his mysterious and unexpected death at the young age of 40. Cities fight over the rightful ownership of his bones and his legacy. In this illustrated lecture, writer A. N. Devers will revisit Poe’s burial, his subsequent re-burial years later, and the restaging of his funeral in 2009, a huge affair in which a horse-drawn casket carrying Poe’s life-size rubber cadaver was pulled through the streets of Baltimore before being eulogized by actors in costume from his past and from the future (like H.P. Lovecraft and Walt Whitman). She will prod at literary celebrity, how we memorialize the dead, and how these events can alter the perceived biographical history of a person.

A. N. Devers’ writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Slate, Slice, Tin House, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and in other publications. She has written about Poe for Salon and The New Yorker.com, and her Tin House essay about the houses of Edgar Allan Poe, “On the Outskirts” received Notable Distinction in The Best American Essays 2011. She is the founder and editor of Writers’ Houses, an online publication that provides a searchable index of visitable writers’ houses around the world.