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Mon-Fri 10am to 5pm
Sat 9am to 6pm
Sun 9am to 5pm
Mon-Fri 10am to 5pm
Sat 9am to 6pm
Sun 9am to 5pm
Join local Russian River Books & Letters for an evening with poet Kelly Gray who will read from her prize winning manuscript from Tusculum Review at 7pm on Friday, December 8th. The Mating Calls of the Specter is a collection of poems told by a young apparition returned to her rural landscape to recapitulate the crimes against her and rise through the coastal prairies to hold us all to account. Prize judge Justin Phillip Reed, winner of the National Book Award, writes, "...it's really the sensual that gets me-- some restoration of faith in the body-poem union comes terrifically alive here, not at least due to the presence of damp animals, sharp instruments, bare stomachs, waft of beer breath, truck exhaust, "thin femurs//jagged alps of opossum teeth."
The reading will be followed by a Q & A with Manjula Martin, author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, (coming in January 2024 from Pantheon Books with a reading at Books & Letters!)
Kelly Gray is a writer and educator living with her family nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean, on the lands of Coast Miwok and Southern Kashaya Pomo people, deep in the redwood forest. Her collections include Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press) and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, Gold Medal winner from IPPY), and she is the recipient of the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize for her manuscript The Mating Calls of the Specter, judged by poet Justin Phillip Reed. Most recently, she was a participant in the Kenyon Review Poetry Workshop and her writing has or will appear in Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Driftwood Press, River Heron Review, Lake Effect, trampset, Rust & Moth, Passages North, and Harbor Review. When she's not writing, she teaches with California Poets in the School at the elementary and high school level.