NEW ORLEANS (press release) – Blue Cypress Books hosts poet Carolyn Hembree on Friday, Feb. 16, at 7 p.m. in celebration of her newest collection of poetry, “For Today.” The event will include readings from Ms. Hembree as well as poets Skye Jackson and Michael Tod Edgerton. The readings will be followed by an audience q&a and a book signing.
This event is free and open to the public and will take place at Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge, located at 6621 St Claude Ave. Copies of Carolyn Hembree’s book, “For Today” (LSU Press, 2024) may be purchased before or during the event. More about the event here.
“Carolyn Hembree’s For Today is a wild ride of formal innovation, odes, and elegies. Any reader would be taken with the poet’s modified sonnet crown, her villanelle, her prose poems, and the musical opus that is the gorgeously long title poem. But I am most impressed by how Hembree manages all of this while also daring to write a poetry so sharp and bare it aims at nothing but the heart.” — Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry
For Today: A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree’s For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father’s death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.
Carolyn Hembree is the author of three poetry collections: For Today (LSU Press, 2024); Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague (Trio House Press, 2016), winner of the Trio Award and the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award; and Skinny (Kore Press, 2012). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other publications. She received a 2016-2017 ATLAS grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents and has also received grants and fellowships from PEN, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation. An associate professor in the University of New Orleans M.F.A. program, she was awarded the university’s 2017 Excellence in Teaching Award. Carolyn serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine. Read more here: https://carolynhembree.com/#about
Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. Her work has been a finalist for the 2023 Iowa Review Poetry Award, the RATTLE Poetry Prize, the RHINO Founders’ Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award. Skye’s work was also selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City, and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida. She currently teaches at Xavier University.
Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queerboy poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, Sonora Review, VOLT, and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He currently teaches at San José State University and serves on the poetry-editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com and WhatMostVividly.com
