Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets and coordinated by Mildred Barya. This month, we welcome Marlanda Dekine, Hilda Downer, and Ann Shurgin.
This is a hybrid event, meaning there is an option to attend virtually and a limited amount of seats available to attend the event in-store. Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
Please click here to register for the IN-PERSON event.
If you decide to attend and purchase the author’s books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. You may also support our work by purchasing a gift card or making a donation of any amount below. Thank you!
Feel free to email [email protected] with questions. We look forward to seeing you, whether in-person or online!
Marlanda Dekine is the winner of the 2021 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize. Concerned with ancestry, memory, and the process of staying within one’s own body, their work leaves spells and incantations for others to follow for themselves. Dekine is a Tin House Own Path Scholar and author of the self-published collection and mixtape, i am from a punch & a kiss (2017). Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in the Poetry Out Loud Anthology, POETRY Magazine, Emergence Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. They live in South Carolina with their dog Malachi. For more, visit https://sapientsoul.square.site
Marlanda Dekine’s debut collection, Thresh & Hold is a holy, radical unlearning and reclamation of self. What does it mean to be a Gullah-Geechee descendant from a rural place where a third of the nation’s founding wealth was harvested by trafficked West and Central Africans? Dekine’s poems travel across age and time, signaling that both the past and future exist in the present. Through erasure and persona, Dekine reimagines intergenerational traumas and calls to task narratives of modern-day museums and the Works Progress Administration. Beyond gospel music, fear, and previous generation stories, Thresh & Hold offers magic, healing, and innovative pathways to manifest intimacy.
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Hilda Downer, a long term member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and North Carolina Writers Conference, has an MA in English from Appalachian State University and an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. Retired from teaching English, she also worked as a psychiatric nurse for over 38 years. Her first book of poetry, Bandana Creek, was published by Red Clay Press. Her second book, Sky Under the Roof, by Bottom Dog Press was a Nautilus Golden Winner. She has published essays and poetry in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in Sugar Grove, NC.
For more, visit [email protected]
We must “relearn ourselves / with what we have now,” Hilda Downer says in her new collection When Light Waits for Us. Time—in all its countless iterations and absences—bears in on her from every side, all of life an excavation site, a record of who she became and, more hauntingly, who she did not. Even so, Downer recognizes that we live in a “delicate microcosm” where “orchids [are] so specialized / their pollination requires / one particular species of insects.” Her poems assert that we are no different, our souls intersecting, thereby giving us all these ways—music, photography, even poems—to “invent an art to make it worth starting over.”
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Ann Shurgin grew up in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and holds a degree in English and journalism from East Tennessee State University. After a career in journalism and communications in Texas, she moved back home to the Appalachian Mountains. She is a member of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative and the Appalachian Studies Association. While the Whippoorwill Called is her first book of poetry.
While the Whippoorwill Called is a sensual delight rooted in laurel thicket and balsam ridge, in the amber glow of home left and returned to, a voice sometimes alone in the mountains nonetheless singing free. Ann Shurgin’s debut poetry collection is also a heart tugger, wishing for love once tasted then flowing past. Both poet and photographer, Shurgin centers us in her lens of wishing and independence, on the Tennessee/Carolina border, knowing that “a stone from Appalachia / is lost without the hollows / and the whippoorwills.” Wrap yourself in evanescent memory and life’s great unfurling, in the quiet woods of what was and is yet to be.
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Mildred Kiconco Barya is a writer and poet. She has written short-stories and essays for various publications, features and travel articles for newspapers. Her first collection of poetry titled: Men Love Chocolates But They Don’t Say won the National Award for poetry publication 2002. She is also the author of the poetry collections The Price of Memory and Give Me Room to Move My Feet. Barya is Assistant professor of Creative Writing and World Literature at University of North Carolina-Asheville. Learn more at http://mildredbarya.com/.