Programs & Events

Now in its 15th year at the Hammer, Bloomsday is a worldwide annual celebration of James Joyce and his landmark book Ulysses. This lively celebration features a cast of veteran actors delivering dramatic readings from the novel interspersed with songs. Followed by festivities in the museum’s courtyard with live music and Guinness on tap.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Forrest Gander reads from Mojave Ghost, which unfolds from desert walks during which he discovers the reticulations of past and present, actual and recalled, physical and spiritual.

Armen Davoudian, who grew up in Isfahan, Iran, will read from his first volume of poems, The Palace of Forty Pillars, which the San Francisco Chronicle named “Best Book of Spring.”

Adam Phillips, called Britain’s foremost contemporary psychoanalytic thinker, will be in conversation with UCLA English Professors David Russell and Mona Simpson.

First an eminent poet, as well as a literary critic, translator, classicist, and painter, Rosanna Warren has recently published a biography of protean genius Max Jacob and a book of poems entitled So Forth.

Lasdun will read from his forthcoming nonfiction work Family Man: The Enigma of Alex Murdaugh, about the infamous South Carolina murders, which originated as the most-read New Yorker article of 2023

In her new innovative anthology, acclaimed author Roxane Gay explores what feminism looks like in practice in an interpretation of the feminist canon that is expansive rather than definitive. Moderated by filmmaker Amber J. Phillips.

Now in its 16th year at the Hammer, Bloomsday is a worldwide annual celebration of James Joyce and his landmark book Ulysses. This lively celebration features a cast of actors delivering dramatic readings from the novel interspersed with songs.

In her newest publication, award-winning author Jean Strouse captures the dramas, mysteries, intrigues, and tragedies surrounding John Singer Sargent's portraits of the Wertheimer family.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel Audition is a compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel that asks who we are to the people we love.