A Woman of Substance: Poetry

Dorsey Craft explores the emotionally fraught territory of pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood in A Brief History of Accidental Inventions. Kate Gaskin chronicles a mother’s harrowing journey through infant loss and a disastrous hospital birth in A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart. Patricia Lockwood mines minerals and conversation in Agate Head / Stone Soup. Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations in Broken Houses.

Purchase your book from Charis Books & More. When you check-out from that link, please mention that you will need to pick your book up at the event. Books will also be for sale on-site by Charis, and a portion of your purchase will benefit the Decatur Book Festival.

This event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required, and seating is first come, first served. Signing information: Signing time: 1:45 PM

Signing location: Decatur Library Meeting Room

About the Authors

Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder and two chapbooks. Plunder was the winner of the 2020 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Craft’s poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Anderson Center at Tower View, and Yaddo. She holds both an MFA in poetry from McNeese State University and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. Craft teaches at the University of North Florida and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for AGNI. Her new collection is A Brief History of Accidental Inventions. 

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She directs the Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program and is an assistant editor for Texas Review Press: The University Press of Sam Houston State University. Her new book is A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart.

Patricia Lockwood is the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist and Dylan Thomas Prize–winning novel No One Is Talking About This, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2021 by The New York Times Book Review and one of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the past 100 years. Her other books include the memoir Priestdaddy, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, the novel Will There Ever Be Another You, and two poetry collections. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and the London Review of Books, where she is a contributing editor. She joins us with her new book of poetry, Agate Head / Stone Soup.

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Broken Houses and Still Life with Mother and Knife, both published by Louisiana State University Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and many other journals. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Macon and teaches at Mercer University. Since 2019, she has served as the Poet Laureate of Georgia.