The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is thrilled to welcome award-winning poets Erin Hoover and Nicole Santalucia for a reading and signing on their new collections, No Spare People (Hoover) and The Book of Dirt (Santalucia). This event is free and open to the public!
No Spare People documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins. From poems about finding autonomy as a queer, unpartnered parent by choice in the South to those chronicling a generation's economic instability, Hoover rejects so-called "acceptable losses" stemming from inequalities of gender, race, and class. The book asks, what happens to the woman no longer willing to live a lie? How does language invent not only identity, but possibility?
About The Book of Dirt:
Veering from wry surrealism to ebullient slapstick, the poems in Nicole Santalucia's The Book of Dirt chronicle outrage, love, and fear, wed to the terrain and culture of southern-central Pennsylvania. In this collection, lesbians crawl out of the grave that America has been digging since its inception; these are timely poems of resistance, celebrating marriage, sobriety, and survival.
About the Authors:
Erin Hoover teaches creative writing and literary editing as an assistant professor of English at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts the in-person poetry reading series Sawmill Poetry and produces the “Not Abandon, But Abide” interview series for the Southern Review of Books. Her debut collection, Barnburner, won Elixir Press’s Antivenom Award and a Florida Book Award in Poetry. Hoover lives in middle Tennessee with her family but was born and raised in central Pennsylvania. In addition to teaching, she’s worked as an editor, journalist, fundraiser, and public relations director.
Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books, 2020), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press, 2018), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press, 2015). She is a recipient of the Charlotte Mew Chapbook Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Best American Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Los Angeles Review, Colorado Review, The Normal School, North American Review, and others. She teaches at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.
