Yoga For Creativity + Poetry Reading With Sebastian Merrill (In Conversation With Morgan LaRocca)

Please join The Ivy Bookshop for an outdoor yoga class + poetry reading, featuring Sebastian Merrill and his debut collection, GHOST :: SEEDS! This is a special 2-part event in The Ivy’s gardens in celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, yoga, and debut poetry.

At 2pm, join award-winning poet and yoga instructor Sebastian Merrill for a donation-based yoga practice designed to help cultivate creativity. This hour-long sequence will inspire you to tune into your own sense of wonder. We’ll move, we’ll breathe, we’ll build some heat, and then we’ll slow it down, incorporating pranayama (breath work) and meditation to get a little closer to our intuition. Sebastian’s teaching is gender affirming, body positive, and consent oriented. All bodies, sizes, and abilities are welcome and celebrated. For yoga class, please bring a mat and wear clothes you feel comfortable moving in.

Then, stay after class for a reading and conversation at 3:30, featuring Sebastian Merrill alongside Morgan LaRocca, the publicist at Milkweed Editions!

Sebastian Merrill’s debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, published by Texas Review Press in November 2023. A winner of the 2024 Stonewall Honor Book – Barbara Gittings Literature Award from the American Library Association, GHOST :: SEEDS was also selected by Ellen Doré Watson as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize for Poetry from Friends of Writers. Sebastian was selected as a member of the 2023 Get the Word Out inaugural poetry cohort for debut writers from Poets & Writers, served as a staff-scholar for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2022 and 2023, and was selected as the Summer 2023 Warren Wilson MFA Alumni Residency Fellow. The recipient of the Rodney Jack Scholarship from Friends of Writers, he holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a BA from Wellesley College.

Morgan LaRocca is the publicist at Milkweed Editions. Prior to joining Milkweed in 2022 they worked as a freelance publicist, Publicity Associate at Graywolf Press and served as Marketing and Publicity intern at Tin House Books. They also serve as the publicity mentor for Poets & Writers “Get the Word Out” Publicity incubator. They are a graduate of Towson University and a proud Baltimorean.