Poetrio is our monthly poetry event, hosted by Mildred Kiconco Barya. Due to an influx of fine poets, “Poet Quartet” will debut on April 23rd and feature Kelli Allen, Luke Hankins, Cathryn Hankla, and Annie Woodford!
This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited number of seats are 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. Note the important event details on the RSVP form.
All of the poets’ new books will be available to purchase in-store at the event. You may also call us at 828-254-6734 order online below.
If you decide to attend and to purchase 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!
Kelli Allen is an award-wining poet, editor, and dancer. Her latest book is Leaving the Skin on the Bear, C&R Press, 2022. Her fiction has appeared in The Best Small Fictions 2022, and she is the recipient of the 2018 Magpie Award for Poetry. Her two chapbooks: Some Animals, won the 2016 Etchings Press Prize, and How We Disappear won the 2016 Damfino Press award. She is the co-Founding Editor of Book of Matches literary journal and currently teaches writing and literature in North Carolina. For more, visit www.kelli-allen.com
These poems crackle with feral intensity, with “want and seawater,” with the desire to know the world in all its rowdy glamour and to praise that world. I love how these poems include the caterpillar, the tongue and the bamboo prayer beads, how they weep and cackle over goat-carts and tossed coins. This is a luminous and spicy collection of poems with the power to inspire us to live more deeply that we thought possible. —Jay Leeming
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Luke Hankins is the author of two poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, and a collection of essays, The Work of Creation. A volume of his translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems, was released by Seagull Books in 2019. Hankins is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. For more, visit https://lukehankins.net
Testament shows Luke Hankins deftly at work in a ‘small glory’ of a chapbook! Whether addressing the troubled country that is America or bringing the reader into the prayer-like intimacy of resonant daily moments, Hankins’s poems here create spaces of presence and awareness that are refreshing and which reward rereading. Testament evokes its title by speaking the facts of the self in such ways that we can join Hankins in loving ‘the broken world better / that has broken me.’ –José Angel Araguz
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Cathryn Hankla is a writer, editor, teacher, and seeker; she’s the author of sixteen books in three genres, including Immortal Stuff: prose poems; Not Xanadu: poems; the recent memoir in essays, Lost Places: on losing and finding home; and the story collection Fortune Teller Miracle Fish. Hankla is professor emerita of English & Creative Writing, Hollins University and edits poetry for The Hollins Critic. She enjoys hikes and walks in the Appalachians region and exhibits artwork at Market Gallery in Roanoke, Virginia. For more, visit https://www.cathrynhankla.com
Cathryn Hankla offers us a collection of moments, stories, and encounters that form a labyrinth we could otherwise call the human condition. She speaks to us as an old friend we must listen to. If you haven’t read Hankla before you’ll be surprised at her range—Gershwin, Mozart, tree frogs, Gettysburg—and her music, evident here in prose poems that sing as few can. If you have read her previously, as I have for years, you’ll be heartened by the wisdom, clarity, and honesty of Immortal Stuff. –Pablo Medina
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Annie Woodford is concerned with how people make beauty despite precarity and perhaps because of it. She has been a community college educator since 2001 and has taught at Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, NC since 2018. Her first book of poetry, Bootleg, was a runner-up for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian poetry. Her second book, Where You Come from Is Gone (Oct. 2022) is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize. For more, visit https://www.anniewoodfordpoet.com
This is a collection that interrogates the nuance of what ‘home’ actually means. Set in the deep South, Woodford captains a journey toward a place of great comfort, pastoral beauty, and familiarity while confronting the historical violence of both race and class. In this work, the poems lift above the page and gently question the ways in which love coupled with disgrace create the tapestry that is, at once, our families, our memories, our lives. –Airea Matthews
