DAVID KIRBY is influenced by artists as diverse as John Keats and Little Richard, and writes distinctive long-lined narrative poems that braid together high and popular culture, personal memory, philosophy, and humor. Kirby is the author of more than two dozen volumes of criticism, essays, children’s literature, pedagogy, and poetry. His numerous collections of poetry include The Ha-Ha (2003), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize, and The House on Boulevard Street: New and Selected Poems (2007), a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Florida Book Award and the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award. In nominating Boulevard Street, the National Book Award committee noted, “Digression and punctiliousness, directed movement and lollygagging, bemusement and piercing insight are among the many paradoxical dualities that energize and complicate the locomotion of his informed, capacious consciousness.”
Kirby has also won several Pushcart Prizes, the Guy Owen Prize, the Kay Deeter Award, the James Dickey Prize, the Brittingham Prize, and the Millennium Cultural Recognition Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Florida Arts Council. His poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including several issues of Best American Poetry. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.”
Kirby is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Since 1969 he has taught at Florida State University, where he has received several teaching awards. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, poet Barbara Hamby. Along with his earlier work, Kirby's latest collection of poems, More Than This, published by LSU Press (2019), is available for sale by The Book Lady.
CHAD FARIES’ poetry collection, The Border Will Be Soon, was the winner of the Emergency Press open book competition (2007). He has published poems, essays, photographs, interviews, and creative non-fiction in Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, New American Writing, Barrow Street, The Hawaii Review, Afterimage, Post Road, and others. He has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he was editor of The Cream City Review and was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest. The Book of Knowledge (Vulgar Marsala Press), his second poetry collection, was published in 2009. His memoir, Drive Me Out of My Mind, which chronicles his first ten years in over twenty-four different houses across the country was published by Emergency Press in 2011. He is working on a follow up to that entitled Burning Down the Houses. Apart from writing, Faries has also told stories on The Unchained Tour, produced by Moth founder George Dawes Green. When not telling stories with words, he creates stories with repurposed wood and found objects. His home, Diamond Oaks Treehouse—and its whimsical carpentry—have been featured in This Old House Magazine, South Magazine, and Savannah Magazine. When not teaching at Savannah State University or petting his cats in Thunderbolt, Georgia, Faries is likely lost somewhere in the world on a motorcycle or running up a hill to practice breathing and pushing up from crow into a handstand. He recently produced a documentary, Iron Family, about his special needs sister Jazmine, who has created six seasons of her play, The Double Life. The play is about her love affair with Matthew McConnaughey (played by Faries) and each summer, family and friends and the magnetic energy of Iron River, Michigan, bring the play to the stage during rodeo weekend.
[*Please note: there is an additional, earlier in the day (1:30 pm) free Q&A event with the poets and SSU students and faculty that is also open to the public, and must be accessed with a separate Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/99003217842#success The public is welcome to attend both the daytime and evening events. The longer readings will be held at the evening’s 6:30 event; Zoom link below.]