the 2026 Robinson JefFers Tor House Foundation Fall Festival
“Shine, Perishing Republic”
October 16 - 18
“Shine, Perishing Republic” is a poem Jeffers wrote over one hundred years ago and published in his breakthrough book Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925). Our festival this year will consider the meaning and legacy of this prophetic poem as well as the fraught connection between art and politics. Jeffers himself addressed the issue in “The Poet in a Democracy,” a lecture he presented at the Library of Congress in 1941.
What is the role of poetry in public life?
What unique responsibilities do poets bear?
What did Jeffers see when he looked back at the history of the United States and forward to its future, while living through an ever-fretful present?
How does Jeffers speak to us today?
What insights, what forewarnings, can be found in Jeffers’s seminal poem?
A distinguished panel of speakers will share their thoughts on these and other questions during the Saturday seminars at the Woman’s Club in Carmel. See the full schedule and speaker biographies below.
Advance registrations will be available shortly on this site through the Reservations button above.
Tor House Sunset Celebration, $35, reservation required.
Saturday seminars: free. Optional box lunch: $25, reservation required for box lunch, not for seminars.
Saturday reception and dinner: $95, reservation required.
Sunday Pt. Lobos poetry/geology walk with Aaron Yoshinobu: $50, reservation required.
Event Details
Sunset Celebration at Tor House
Music, Poetry, Refreshments
Friday, October 16, 5:00–7:00 PM: Sunset Celebration at Tor House
Wine and hors d’oeuvres reception; piano and Irish harp music performed by Melinda Coffey Armstead and Pauline Troia; poetry readings by Taelen Thomas and Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts.
Reservation: $35.
Saturday, October 17, 8:30 AM – 3:45 PM. Carmel Woman’s Club Presentations
Free and open to the public. Preorder optional box lunch for $25.
8:30–9:00: Coffee and Pastries
9:00–9:10: Welcome: Eric Smith, President, Tor House Foundation
9:10–9:25: Introduction: James Karman
9:25–10:00: Jesse Nathan, “Poetry in Difficult Times”
10:00–10:35: Richard Kezirian, “The ‘We’ in Weimar”
10:35–10:45: Coffee Break
10:45–11:20: André Naffis-Sahely, “‘All the Blood Lakes’: The Anti-Imperialist We Forgot”
11:20–11:50: Katie Peterson, “Timemaxxing Robinson Jeffers”
12:00–1:15: Lunch. Optional box lunch at Woman’s Club, $25 and optional round table discussion over lunch with poets.
1:00–1:10: Aaron Yoshinobu, “Sunday’s Poetry Walk at Point Lobos: What You Need to Know”
1:10–1:15: Introduction to afternoon sessions: Aaron Yoshinobu, moderator
1:15–1:50: Matthew Calarco, “Inhumanism as a Way of Life”
1:50–2:25: Laura diZerega, “The Reluctant Modernist? Robinson Jeffers, Tor House and Domestic Architecture in the American West, 1910–1940”
2:30–2:40: Coffee Break
2:40–3:10: Susan Shillinglaw, “Turbulent Carmel, 1920s and ’30s”
3:10–3:40: Open Discussion
Saturday, October 17, 5:00–8:00 PM: Reception and Banquet at
Monterey Conference Center
7:00: Speaker TBA
Reservation: $95
SUnday Poetry walk:
A Warm-Beating Heart Housed in Granite
Sunday, October 18, 8:00 AM–1:00 PM: Poetry/Geology Walk at Point Lobos
NOTE: TRANSPORTATION AND PARKING INSTRUCTIONS COMING SOON.
SUnday Poetry walk: A Warm-Beating Heart Housed in Granite
Crowdsourcing a 21st-century reading of Robinson Jeffers on the coast and at Tor (Your) House.
Introduction
The final event of the 2026 Fall Festival is a geologist’s tour. Professor Aaron Yoshinobu will conduct a poetry walk beginning in Point Lobos State Park and concluding with a lunch on the lawn at Tor House. During this half-day excursion participants will hear selected writings of Robinson Jeffers while observing and considering old and new ways of describing and interpreting human interaction with nature in the 21st century. We will engage with the geology, ecology and human habitation of the coast as a means of exploring novel ways to integrate science with art. Considering Jeffers’s poetry in situ prompts us to greater awareness and equanimity in challenging times.
Poetry Walk schedule:
Saturday October 17, 12:45-1:00, Carmel Woman’s Club. Pre-tour introduction and guidebook. Professor Yoshinobu will introduce Sunday’s excursion at the Saturday seminars. “A Robinson Jeffers Mosaic on the Origin of the Universe and the Water You Drink: An introduction to Sunday’s poetry walk”. Distribution of the guidebook and the assignment!
Sunday October 18, 8:15 AM-11:30: Meet at Whaler’s Cove museum. Walk to Coal Shute Cove (0.1 miles) and Granite Point/The Pit (0.2 mi.) with stops along the trail and at the beach in ‘The Pit’. Low tide is about 9:23 AM. Participants will explore coastal geology, ecology, and history as interwoven in Jeffers’s writing. Professor Yoshinobu will consider temporal and spatial scales from astronomic (the sun and stars), to geologic (granite and sandstone, beach erosion and stratigraphy), to human: indigenous inhabitants, whalers and abalone divers, Carmelites. immigrants, artists, and tourists. Considering this layered history, we will read Jeffers verses that that help us recalibrate views of ourselves, the Earth, and the cosmos.
As participants consider Jeffers poetry, as well as the ecology of place, attendees will participate in developing a “crowd-sourced” 21st century perspective on the impact of Jeffers’s poems on contemporary problems we face on Earth.
12:00-1:30: Regroup at Tor House, where a traditional “field geologists’” lunch awaits participants. There we will combine participant perspectives to create a crowd-sourced way to read Robinson Jeffers in the 21st century. These observations will be posted online in the Tor House Foundation Blog.
November 2026: In the following month the Tor House Foundation and the Robinson Jeffers Association will co-host a webinar focusing on ways to re-read Jeffers in a 21st century social, environmental, and political context. This will include a recasting of what was discussed on the field trip combined with solicited insights from select Jeffers scholars and enthusiasts.
Event is $50.00, which includes entrance to Point Lobos State Park, printed guidebook, and a “field geologist’s lunch”. Maximum 25 participants. Registration and prepayment is required.
What to bring: Portable chair if you like, water, and one of your favorite Jeffers poems.
Speaker BIOGRAPHIES
Melinda Coffey Armstead, a trustee of the Tor House Foundation and director of its music programs (including the “Not at Home Before 4 PM” series), has performed internationally as a solo and chamber pianist. Her work can be heard on a number of audio and video recordings, including Southerly: Art Songs of the American South and As One.
Matthew Calarco, Chair and Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fullerton, specializes in the fields of Continental philosophy, animal studies, and the environmental humanities. The bulk of his academic writing focuses on the ethical and political implications of the breakdown of traditional divisions between human beings and animals. A long-time admirer and student of Jeffers’s work, he recently published a book titled How Not to Be Human: The Inhumanist Philosophy of Robinson Jeffers.
Laura diZerega, PhD in the history of art and architecture, wrote her dissertation on Catholic Prussian resistance to the Protestant monarchy's obstruction of parish church building between 1815–1840. She recently published an essay on her research in Architecture Against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Currently she is a project editor with the J. Paul Getty Museum, assistant editor of the journal Architectural Histories, and a Tor House Foundation trustee.
James Karman, professor emeritus in the department of English and the department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico, received the Oscar Lewis Award from the Book Club of California for his contributions to western history. He is the author of Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet and the editor of The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers.
Richard Kezirian is professor emeritus from Monterey Peninsula College (MPC), where he was recipient of the 1986 Allen Griffin Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2014 MPC President’s Award for community service. He is the author of American History: Major Controversies Reviewed, as well as numerous op/ed essays that have appeared in California newspapers. Currently, he is a professor at the Panetta Institute.
André Naffis-Sahely is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017) and High Desert (Bloodaxe Books, 2022), as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020). He is a recipient of the Cholmondeley Award and has translated over twenty titles from French and Italian. He teaches at UC Davis.
Jesse Nathan teaches literature at UC Berkeley. Raised in northern California and rural Kansas, he was awarded the Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf. His first book of poems, Eggtooth (2023), a “brilliant and unexpected” collection, notes Robert Hass, won numerous awards. Nathan’s poems appear in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Best American Poetry.
Katie Peterson, Professor of English at UC Davis and founding Director of the MFA program, has published six collections of poetry, most recently Fog and Smoke (2024) and Life in a Field (2021), a collaboration with photographer Young Suh. Her recent essays and poems can be found in The Atlantic, the Harvard Review, the Paris Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other journals. She edited Robert Lowell’s New Selected Poems.
Elliot Ruchowitz-Roberts, past President of the Tor House Foundation, coordinates the annual Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is the author of White Fire, a collection of poems, and two chapbooks; he is also the co-editor/co-translator of two works from the Telugu, Sudha (Nectar) by Chalam and The Selected Verses of Vemana.
Susan Shillinglaw, trustee and Vice President of the Tor House Foundation, is professor emerita of English at San Jose State University, where she taught for 37 years, and for 18 years was Director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies. From 2015–18 she was Director of Salinas’s National Steinbeck Center. She has published extensively on John Steinbeck, most recently Steinbeck’s Landscapes: Where Story Meets Place (Timber Press, 2026).
Taelen Thomas, known also as “The Bard of Carmel Bay,” has been memorizing and performing poetry for many years, especially compositions by Jeffers, William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns, Hart Crane, Ogden Nash, Dylan Thomas, and himself.
Pauline Troia studied piano at the Conservatory of the Chicago Musical College and at Northwestern University. She has been principal accompanist for I Cantori di Carmel and the Camerata Singers and longtime rehearsal pianist for the Carmel Bach Festival. She currently provides music for Congregation Beth Israel in Carmel Valley and for Compass Church in Salinas.
Aaron Yoshinobu, trustee of the Tor House Foundation and past President of the Robinson Jeffers Association, is a professor of Structural Geology and Tectonics at Texas Tech University. He grew up in Pacific Grove, CA, and spends his career working with students and colleagues as they explore and construct geologic maps of ancient mountain ranges in the western US, Norway, Patagonia, and elsewhere. While his published work focuses on the nature of magma movement in the interior of the Earth, he is now interested in the intersection of human engagement with rocks, science, art, and spirituality, particularly in the works of Robinson Jeffers.