WORD Presents Four Way Books Fall Reading

Join WORD in celebrating Four Way Books' Fall 2023 releases with readings from A.H. Jerriod Avant, Adrian Blevins, Michael Dumanis, Mary Slechta, & Daniel Tobin

FREE EVENT! Limited Seating + Additional Standing Room; RSVP below

Masks appreciated!

*Please note event space is only accessible by stairs; we do not have an elevator.*

About the Readers

A. H. Jerriod Avant was born and raised in Longtown, Mississippi. A graduate of Jackson State University, Jerriod has earned MFA degrees from Spalding University and New York University. He’s received scholarships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. A former resident at the James Castle House and Vermont Studio Center, Jerriod has received two winter fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an emerging artist grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. His work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pinwheel, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, Obsidian, The Yale Review, and other journals. He’s currently a Ph.D. English candidate (Spring 2023) at the University of Rhode Island and a Teaching Fellow in English at Wesleyan University.

Adrian Blevins is the author of three previous full-length collections of poetry—Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha—and, with co-editor Karen Salyer McElmurray, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.

Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD from the University of Houston. The author of My Soviet Union, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, he is the recipient of the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in Vermont, where he teaches at Bennington College and serves as editor of Bennington Review.

Mary McLaughlin Slechta grew up in a tiny world carved out of New England by southern African-Americans and Jamaicans. She is author of The Spoonmaker’s Diamond (Night Owl Press) and a poetry collection, Wreckage on a Watery Moon (FootHills). Her work appears in journals and anthologies including Mom Egg Review, Rattle, and Black Lives Have Always Mattered (2LeafPress), and is forthcoming in Jelly Bucket, midnight & indigo, and Best Small Fictions 2021. A Pushcart nominee, recipient of the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize from The Caribbean Writer, and two-time poet-in-residence at the Chautauqua Institution, she is a Kimbilio Fellow and editor with great weather for Media after a long career in education.

Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, Where the World Is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens, The Net, From Nothing, and Blood Labors, which the New York Times and Washington Independent Review of Books named one of the Best Poetry Books of the year. He is the author of the critical studies Awake in America, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, and On Serious Earth, as well as the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Arts (with Pimone Triplett), and To the Many: Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, the Stephen J. Meringoff Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston.

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