Events Calendar

Please join us for a virtual reading and conversation with Donika Kelly and Mark Wunderlich to celebrate their new books of poetry published by Graywolf Press.  Donika Kelly will read from The Renunciations,  and Mark Wunderlich will read from God of Nothingness, winner of the UNT Rilke Prize and the Lambda Literary Award.

Oprah.com calls The Renunciations, "a lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside of old mythologies and traumas in search of new stories fashioned from love and joy. . . . Like some sort of oracle, Kelly offers us the words to create our own destinies.” Khadijah Queen says of the book, "With Donika Kelly’s signature stinging beauty, The Renunciations names acts of wounding and making, refuses to separate elemental memory from the language of human remembrance. . . .  Kelly’s poems gather us from cliff edge to river fold, from terror to more terror, from what cannot be known to what intuition and mirrors can divine.”  Donika Kelly is the author of Bestiary, winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She teaches at the University of Iowa.

The poems in Wunderlich's God of Nothingness push deep into the realm of human frailty and loss, giving voice to the swirling spirits around our non-negotiable mortality. According to Ada Limón, “Mark Wunderlich’s poems are alarmingly wise, lyrically charged, and built out of an almost otherworldly clarity. . . . Wunderlich makes an argument not for beauty but for a clear-eyed resilience. God of Nothingness is a book that is as devastating as it is life-affirming, a weapon that both wounds and saves.”  Mark Wunderlich is also the author of Voluntary Servitude; and The Anchorage, winner of the Lambda Literary Award. He teaches at Bennington College and lives in the Hudson Valley in New York.