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Pre-registering helps us order enough books for our guests and helps us set up the room for safety and comfort. We will allow pre-registrants to be seated first. No one will be turned away, but please note that seating is limited. Please contact the store ahead of time if you need assistance with mobility or other concerns - we are happy to help!
Lynnell Edwards’ most recent collection of poetry is This Great Green Valley (Broadstone Books, 2020), a chapbook of documentary poetry based on revisionist narratives of Kentucky’s pioneer founding in the 18th century. Her forthcoming collection, The Bearable Slant of Light is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2024 and explores the impact of mental illness on the family. Three additional full-length poetry collections, Covet, The Highwayman’s Wife, and The Farmer’s Daughter, were published by Red Hen Press. A chapbook, Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop, chronicles the work and art of a glass-blowing studio. Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays have appeared widely. She serves as associate programs director and faculty in poetry for the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Her work often investigates the deep connections between a people and their place, including the natural, political, and family narratives in its history. Visit Edwards' website.
John James is the author of The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), selected by Henri Cole for the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, as well as two chapbooks, most recently Winter, Glossolalia, released in 2022 from London's Black Spring Press Group. His poems appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, PEN Poetry Series, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference, the Academy of American Poets, and the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University. He holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia and is completing a PhD in English at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches creative writing at Bellarmine University.
Kathleen Driskell is an award-winning poet and teacher. She is the author of five books including The Vine Temple, a chapbook title from Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Blue Etiquette: Poems and Next Door to the Dead. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many nationally known literary journals including The New Yorker, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Rattle and are featured online on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in American Life in Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in What Comes Down to Us: 20 Contemporary Kentucky Poets and The Kentucky Anthology. Past chair of the AWP Board (2019-22), Kathleen is professor of Creative Writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University, home of the nationally distinguished low-residency MFA in Writing Program.
Mobility device access info:
While our store has ramp access to the right of the main entrance, the event space is more easily accessed by entering at Bayly Avenue. Please call the store when you arrive and we will be happy to welcome you via this entrance. This door is next to a loading zone for easy car access, and our parking lot reserved ADA spots are also close to this entrance.
This book cannot be returned.
Poetry. Genius loci. The pervading spirit of a place. This little book from Lynnell Edwards is all about the spirit of a very specific place, in this case the environs of central Kentucky, and she writes about this place in two very different times, in two very different styles. So different, in fact, that one might first wonder what the two parts of the book have in common.
In poems as tautly constructed as they are trenchantly observed, Winter, Glossolalia probes the nature of language to depict the world from which it springs. Paired with humorous, often satirical images, this collection explores human ingenuity and creativity against the material resources of the given world, highlighting the possibilities and the limits of artistic making.
Winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, The Milk Hours is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss.
Poems that meditate on light and darkness in the natural world.
In The Vine Temple, Kathleen Driskell invites readers to walk with her through past landscapes, including a Confederate cemetery near her turbulent childhood home and more recent hikes in a nearby park, where the sacred and sublime reveal themselves in the natural world.
When Kathleen Driskell pulled an old edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette from the used bookstore shelf and blew dust off the blue linen cover, she instantly found herself and her family within those pages—not as the Worldlys, Oldlineages, or the Gildings (archetypes Post created to demonstrate how to properly manage a grand house full of servants), but as the
