“Andrea Gibson’s Love Letter from the Afterlife” touches down in Ann Arbor

This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, Destination Ann Arbor, the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, and the University Musical Society. 

For Megan Falley, “Andrea Gibson’s Love Letter from the Afterlife,” a multimedia performance that draws together film, live music, and poetry, is “an experience that is blurring the lines between the dead and the living.”

Falley, a writer and poet, was also the wife of the renowned poet Andrea Gibson, whose death in July 2025 from ovarian cancer sparked an outpouring of grief and homage among friends and fans across the country.

Now, Falley is heading on tour with a coterie of poets, musicians, and other guest artists paying tribute to Gibson. The tour touches down in Ann Arbor for a performance at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 8 at the Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty St.

Gibson was known for writing with stark, raw honesty on a wide range of topics including queer issues, gender, and social justice. After they were diagnosed with cancer, their subject matter expanded to include illness, both physical and mental, and mortality generally.

Gibson was also the subject of a 2025 documentary directed by Ryan White, “Come See Me in the Good Light,” which explored Gibson’s life and work, their relationship with Falley, and the pair’s shared navigation of the cancer diagnosis. (The film won a Peabody Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.)

The inspiration for the new performance sprang directly from the filming of the documentary, Falley says.

That process included the recording of what they didn’t realize at the time would be Gibson’s final performance at the Paramount Theatre in Denver in 2024. The footage of that performance is now a short film of its own by the same production team behind the documentary, and “Love Letter from the Afterlife” is at the crux of Falley’s multimedia event.

“What we’ve accomplished with this film feels very, very close to seeing Andrea live,” Falley says.

“Andrea’s shows have always been a gathering place for people to create community. They’ve always been these queer havens, these safe places for people to feel and to express,” she says.

Onstage, Gibson was the physical embodiment of “a person with anxiety, a person with mental health struggles, a queer person on a journey with their gender and how they fit in the world,” says Falley, and as such, she shone as a kind of “lantern through the experience for other people.”

Falley serves as creative director for the event but says she’s taken a “back-seat” role for the performance itself.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s about me,” she says.

She’ll “weave in to tell stories” once in a while, Falley says, and she’ll end each show by reading one of Gibson’s poems—and she might sing, she admits, “which is new territory for me”

“But my goal with all of this has always been to highlight, uplift, and just bring some more sparkle on Andrea.”

Various musicians, many of them longtime friends and collaborators of Gibson’s, will join for portions of the tour, including Sara Bareilles, Ani DiFranco, Chris Pureka, Holly Miranda, Edie Carey, and Autumn Nicholas, among others.

And in a few cities, including Chicago, much larger orchestras (like the Chicago Philharmonic) will also take the stage.

The rest of the time, “we will be traveling with what we are calling the Goosebumps Orchestra,” a five-piece, relatively stripped-down ensemble, according to Falley, who says she incorporated music into the overall performance to “elevate the holiness, the spirituality of it all.”

As an artist, Falley says, Gibson was “transcendent”—but they were also someone who generally stayed late after shows to sign books and talk with fans, creating an after-hours atmosphere of intimate camaraderie.

“People have made lifelong friends at Andrea’s shows,” Falley says. “People go in [as] strangers and don’t leave as strangers.”

That’s an experience Falley is hoping to recreate, or continue, on the current tour, so she’s offering VIP tickets that include a few gifts as well as access to a more intimate Q&A session with Falley herself, “where they can ask me anything…and we can talk about grief and love and death and science and art and all of that,” she says.

“So many wonderful different artists and humans have come together to make the show what it is,” Falley says. “It might just have to be experienced.”

For tickets to the event, including VIP access tickets, please visit https://marquee-arts.org/event-page/?showingId=1028455&eventId=1028454.