Arts Café Mystic: Philip Schultz

Arts Café Mystic: Philip Schultz brings a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to the La Grua Center in Stonington for an evening focused on poetry, storytelling, and the strange ways memory shapes a life. Schultz won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Failure, a deeply personal collection that explored family, self-doubt, dyslexia, and the messy realities hiding underneath everyday life. Over the years, his work has appeared in publications like The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New Republic, helping establish him as one of the more respected voices in contemporary American poetry.

What makes Schultz especially interesting as a speaker is how personal and conversational his work often feels. Before becoming an acclaimed poet, he struggled for years with undiagnosed dyslexia and has spoken openly about feeling disconnected from traditional academic life while growing up. That experience eventually became part of the emotional foundation of his writing, which tends to focus less on grand literary performance and more on honesty, vulnerability, family, regret, and the complicated ways people understand themselves over time.

Arts Café Mystic has quietly become one of the shoreline’s more interesting cultural series, regularly bringing authors, poets, musicians, and thinkers to intimate venues around southeastern Connecticut. For anyone who enjoys literature, thoughtful conversation, or simply hearing accomplished creative people talk about their work in a smaller setting, this feels like one of the weekend’s more low-key hidden gems.

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