Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and coordinated by Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Rochelle Hurt, Todd Boss, and Zoë Fay-Stindt. This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats available to attend the event in-store. The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event.
This event includes a book signing. If you are not attending in person but would like a signed book you may request one using the comments field when you order online or by call the store at 828-254-6734 during store hours.
If you decide to attend and purchase the authors' books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop's. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you! Feel free to email info@malaprops.com with questions. We look forward to seeing you, whether in-person or online!
Rochelle Hurt is the author of the poetry collections The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022), which won the Blue Light Books Prize from Indiana Review; In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in Poetry magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. She's been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. Hurt lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida. For more, visit https://www.rochellehurt.com
Rochelle Hurt has produced a cinematic anthem, a war cry against gender norms, and a sad reminder of how little has changed for girls traversing the rocky journey into adulthood. The strength of this collection is in the collective experiences where the body becomes an object of desire and the origin of resistance. These poems are unapologetic and tender. Part theater, part screenplay, part poetry, The J Girls is a genre-blending collection demanding the reader see these archetypes as real people with real stories and real unspeakable trauma.
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Todd Boss is a poet, public artist, inventor, librettist, and film producer in Minneapolis. His four poetry collections, all from W. W. Norton & Co., include Yellowrocket (2008), Pitch (2012), Tough Luck (2017), and Someday the Plan of a Town (2022). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, and NPR. His first children’s book, The Boy Who Said Wow, is due in 2023 from Simon & Schuster’s Beach Lane imprint. His lyrics have been performed at Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall. His work has been recognized with Grammy nominations and by the National Book Foundation. He is the founding Artistic Director of Motionpoems, a production company that has turned more than 150 contemporary poems into short films. His large-scale public artworks include a building projection, multimedia installations, and VR projects. For more, visit https://www.toddbossoriginals.com
Todd Boss is a walking violin—his ear so tuned to the hidden rhythms of speech that he could make any sorrow sing. And here, in Someday the Plan of a Town, we’re invited to follow that music around the globe as Boss housesits for strangers and falls in love with each new place, each new life. Yet despite this rich worldliness, Todd Boss’s poems turn resolutely inward, searching tenderly for the contours of the human heart.
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Zoë Fay-Stindt (she/Z/they) is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, bird body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize. She lives in Ames, Iowa, where she is an MFA candidate at Iowa State University and community farm volunteer. For more, visit www.zoefaystindt.com.
At times alchemical, at times medicinal, at times invasive, the bird enters the poet’s body with an imaginative force that dazzles. The poet brings other registers into her work—the illness of her mother, the death of an uncle—expanding into a pathos for her beloveds. Together with travels both actual and metaphysical, Zoë Fay-Stindt exquisitely portrays our landscapes, though they be beautiful or damaged, as she celebrates and laments the wet, maternal earth of our home planet. Don’t miss this splendid collection!
Copies of Bird Body will be available for purchase at the event. You may also purchase by phone during store hours at 828-254-6734.
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Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer and poet. She has written short-stories and essays for various publications, features and travel articles for newspapers. Her first collection of poetry titled: Men Love Chocolates But They Don't Say won the National Award for poetry publication 2002. She is also the author of the poetry collections The Price of Memory and Give Me Room to Move My Feet. Barya is Assistant professor of Creative Writing and World Literature at University of North Carolina-Asheville. Learn more at http://mildredbarya.com/.