I Carry My Mother:
An Evening with Lesléa Newman
Wednesday, June 28
7-8 p.m.

Lesléa Newman is the author of 80 books for readers of all ages including the dual memoir-in-verse, I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father; the novel-in-verse, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard; the short story collection, A Letter to Harvey Milk; and the picture books, Sparkle Boy and Heather Has Two Mommies. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, two National Jewish Book Awards, two American Library Association Stonewall Honors, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work Award. From 2008- 2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton, MA.


Digging to Wonderland:
An Evening with David Trinidad
Tuesday, July 25
7-8 p.m.

David Trinidad’s numerous books include Digging to Wonderland: Memory Pieces, Notes on a Past Life, Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera, and The Late Show.  He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith, and Divining Poets: Dickinson, an Emily Dickinson tarot deck. Trinidad currently lives in Chicago, where he is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College.


I Don't Want to Be Understood:
An Evening with Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Tuesday, Aug. 1
7-8 p.m.

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, The Nation, Split Lip, Poem-a-day at poets.org, and more. She is a Pushcart recipient and has had multiple poems anthologized. She is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (2014), THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (2016), and I Don’t Want To Be Understood (2024). She currently lives in West Virginia with her wife, poet/essayist Eileen Elizabeth, and their dog and cat.



The World That the Shooter Left Us:
An Evening with Cyrus Cassells
Thursday, Aug. 24
7-8 p.m.

Cyrus Cassells is the 2021-2022 Poet Laureate of Texas. His most recent book, The World That the Shooter Left Us, was published in 2022, and his ninth book, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch?, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2024. Among his honors: a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship, the 1981 National Poetry Series, a Lambda Literary Award, a Lannan Literary Award, two NEA grants, a Pushcart Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His 2018 volume, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His second volume of Catalan translations, To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, was published in March 2023. He was nominated for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism for his cultural reviews in The Washington Spectator. He is a University Distinguished Professor of English at Texas State University. (Photo credit: ​Rachel Eliza Griffiths)