#poetry #event #booksigning

Laurie Wilcox-Meyer, Finishing Line Press author of Though the Warbler Sings 2026 and Circling Silence 2018 will be reading at Malaprops Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina on October 4th, at 4:30. malaprops.com/event/2026-10-… #poetry #event #booksigning #MeetTheAuthor #FLP

From Miami to New Bern — by way of a sailboat and a search for home. Craven Arts Council & Gallery Executive Director Jonathan Burger sat down with Sheena Powell, local poet and analytical chemist whose new collection, Polyhymnia, draws on nature, science, and the quiet power of verse. A fascinating conversation about art, science, and why New Bern became home. Read the full article: newbernmagazine.com/an-inter… #poetry #interview #books #recommended

newbooksnetwork.com/night-br… #poetry #book #interview

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: COLOR BLIND by Rana Bitar   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Color Blind is a poetry collection that traces the shared bloodlines between racism, gun violence, and war, revealing them as one unbroken human wound. Each poem bears witness to lives cut short, communities fractured, and histories repeating themselves under different names and flags. The poems in this collection refuse the comfort of distance or justification, insisting that violence is never contained—it always returns. Color Blind asks readers to look beyond borders, politics, and skin color, and to sit with the shared grief that remains, calling for remembrance, reckoning, and a clearer way of seeing. #GunViolence #War #Racism, #SharedGrief, #BearingWitness   Rana Bitar is a Syrian-American physician, poet, and writer. She holds a Master’s in creative writing from SNHU. She is the author of a memoir, The Long Tale of Tears and Smiles ( Global Collective Publishers, 2021), two poetry chapbooks, A Loaf of Bread (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and Hold Your Breath (Unsolicited Press, 2023), and a translated poetry book, Love and Resistance (Fernwood Press, 2025). Her poetry and essays appeared in many journals, including  The New York Times and AGNI.Ranabitar.com@RanaBitarBooks   PRAISE:   What do we owe the lives lost to hatred, bullets, and battle—and to the people left to carry their absence? In Color Blind, Rana Bitar turns toward the human cost of violence wherever it takes root. These poems move through personal and collective loss, exposing the stories and suffering too often obscured by headlines, rhetoric, and the passage of time. A searching collection about memory, responsibility, and the possibility of seeing one another anew, Color Blind invites readers to bear witness—and to consider what might change if no one’s grief were treated as distant or disposable. –Leah Huete de Maines, Poet-in-Residence Emerita at Northern Kentucky University   Please share/please repost   #booktok #poetry #FLP #book

FLP MEMOIR OF THE DAY: Getting Saved: Coming Out as a Gay Man and a Composer [memoir] by Gerald Busby, Edited by John Philip Drury   On SALE: finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Gerald Busby’s rollicking and ruminative memoir, Getting Saved: Coming Out as a Gay Man and a Composer, chronicles his adventurous, dramatic life, its tragedies and comedies, starting with his birth in Texas during the Great Depression and his growing up as a piano prodigy and gay adolescent in a Southern Baptist family. He attends Yale, where he studies music and philosophy, coming out as a gay man. After adventures in New York City and traveling as a college textbook salesman out west, he realizes that he’s a composer and devotes his life to that mission, composing Runes for Paul Taylor’s dance company and the haunting score for Robert Altman’s 3 Women. Virgil Thompson helps Gerald and his partner, Sam Byers, find an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, but in a few years both men are diagnosed HIV-positive and Sam dies of AIDS. Gerald overcomes his grief, despair, and drug addiction and resumes composing, learning the Sibelius notation program and presenting his music, including fifty string quartets, through concerts, a CD, and Facebook posts of his scores and audio. He continues to live in the Chelsea Hotel.Hashtags: #GayMemoir #FilmScoring  #RobertAltman #NewYorkCity #ChelseaHotel   Gerald Busby was born in Texas in 1935. A piano prodigy who grew up in a Southern Baptist family, he performed with the Houston Symphony when he was 15 and attended the Yale School of Music, graduating in 1960, two years after coming out as a gay man. His best-known compositions are Runes, commissioned for a ballet by Paul Taylor, and the score for Robert Altman’s film 3 Women. He moved into the Chelsea Hotel with Sam Byers, the love of his life, in 1977. After Sam died of AIDS, Gerald fell apart, gradually recovering and resuming his vocation as a composer. He continues to live in the Chelsea Hotel. PRAISE: Gerald Busby’s life is a grand adventure, and he writes about it with deep insight, passion, and wit. He’s a brilliant composer. I love his music, and now his words. –Hilma Wolitzer, author of Ending and Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket. . Busby bears witness to what it was to grow up gay and gifted among ’50s Texas holy-rollers, then carries us along to Yale, on to the very heart of the wild art scene that was ’70s New York City, and beyond. This story is a grand tour of the arts, America and the last half-century. A soulful, entertaining, no-holds-barred tale of a life brilliantly lived. –Sherill Tippins, author of Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel. . From the window of my apartment, I can see the back of the Chelsea Hotel, where Gerald Busby has lived since 1977, “the last Bohemian in Chelsea,” as New Yorkerwriter Adam Gopnik called him. For all those years, Busby has represented and fostered the genial and provocative creative spirit of our neighborhood—and, more broadly, he has written music that has defined America’s soundtrack and musicality, from his Runes for Paul Taylor, his work on Robert Altman’s 3 Women and A Wedding, to songs for poets. In his memoir Getting Saved, Busby leads us from his boyhood home in Texas into his life as music man, taking us into the Chelsea Hotel and the company of Virgil Thomson and so many other luminaries and lovers, giving us a story full of the melody of the open heart. –David Groff, author of Live in Suspense

ATTN: FLP AUTHORS. Finishing Line Press will be at AWP 2027 in Chicago. Come and sign your FLP book at booth 718 Dates: March 17–20, 2027 Location: McCormick Place | Lakeside Center, Chicago, Ill Please email Deirdre Fagan for more details at DeirdreFagan@ferris.edu. Please put “AWP Book Signing” in the subject line. Deirdre will give you a scheduled time slot. The booth will run Thu-Sat 10-5. Please include your preferences for days/times when emailing Deirdre.

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: halfway by Jenny Moyer   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Jenny Moyer’s halfway invites the reader to consider the transient fragments of life during the most universal emotions – grief, love, and longing. This collection of brief poems crystalizes the disruption of life by grief as it focuses on the small moments throughout the nonlinear journey of healing. Mixing a larger shared human experience with Moyer’s personal struggle, halfway navigates the winding path through the overwhelming to the endurable, acknowledging the lingering state of being halfway healed. #grief #healing #poetry #moments #noticethesmallthings   Jenny Moyer lives in North Carolina’s High Country with her spouse and three dogs. She enjoys reading, music, daydreaming, and spending time in nature. halfway is Jenny’s first chapbook, but although she is just beginning her publishing journey, she has been scribbling for years and holds a B.A. in English Literature. . PRAISE: . “halfway crosses time, distance, and breath to explore how grief keeps us connected. These poems are part-solace, part-prayer rage-screamed at a vengeful god. Don’t let these poems’ brevity fool you: Jenny Moyer fully captures the emotional spectrum and complexity of loss in this gut-punching collection.” –Jessica Cory, Editor, Appalachian Journal  . “halfway haunts the hollow spaces, etching out the aches where the grief gets in. It asks us to celebrate the love that remains after loss and mourn the memories we never got to make. This book epitomizes the adage that in order to heal, you need to feel. Let these words guide you through the agony and monotony and joy of grief into a space of healing.” –Morgan DePue, Poet and Lecturer at Appalachian State University  Please share/please repost  #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

A Poem by Rosemary Herbert paddockreview.com/2026/09/25… #poetry #women #sisters #history @rosemaryherbertwriter

New from Finishing Line Press: Dear Spokane River I Love You by Erin Schmidt   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   Dear Spokane River I Love You contains surprise, sadness, what happens when we get together, clubs, and write that down lines. Last week, I took a photo series between my favorite two places on the Spokane River, the blue bike and Spiral Beach, which inexplicably had an abandoned boat full of trash on the street, which perfectly captured my overall theme of finding contrast in art and trash, and placing myself in the middle of absurdity. Today, I went back to see it in a different light. It was gone. Dear Spokane River I Love You is a poetry collection about trash and water. It’s also about hearts. It lives in the confluence of whimsy and rage. #poetry #Spokane #trash #water #hearts   Erin Schmidt is a writerly artist librarian educator who often blends story, advocacy and heart in her writing. She usually makes tiny illustrated books for her friends, lists of collected lines, and often writes only in titles. Her work explores hearts, hot dogs, raccoons, contrasts, art and beauty, the Spokane River and trash. You can find her work in Pictures of Poets, Poetry Moment, Lilac City Local, various student-produced publications, and in anonymous art around town. Dear Spokane River I Love You is her first book of poetry. She currently lives in Spokane, Washington with her family.    PRAISE:   The brilliance of Erin Schmidt‘s poetry is in its inherent understanding that the Spokane River does not stop at her banks. She boils up out of her bed, over her banks, roiling through willows, to saturate the lives, the desires, and the struggles of those who live in the valley. The human relationships, the passions and desires that come to life within Dear Spokane River I Love You become themselves the beautiful sounds of running water. –Jerry White, Jr., Spokane Riverkeeper Emeritus (2014-2024) . Erin’s writing weaves together the whimsy and the real. Her images are as haunting as they are fantastic! Poetry from Erin is like finding a secret door to unknown land; you never know what’s coming next, only that you’re in the best of hands. –Mery Noel Smith, Spokane Poet Laureate . In this plain spoken “love letter to the Spokane River,” Erin Schmidt transforms everyday detritus into “golden comets.” Part lament and part celebration, the book weaves the voices of students and children with the voice of the author, teacher, parent, and observer. Schmidt is not afraid of sentiment and not afraid of the dark. She writes, “I feel like smashing out all my teeth and replacing them with a gold grill of other people’s teeth” and also, “sometimes my life is 10,000 birds with a sense of direction.” She admits to never being able to give voice to the river in any single line or poem, but somehow, this letter manages to do just that, and finally, it gives us our own role: “find pieces that gleam and take them.” –Polly Buckingham, author of The River People   Please share/please repost  #FLP #preorder #poetry #booktok #poetrytiktok

wordgathering.syr.edu/vol20/… #poetry #disabilityawareness

laduenews.com/calendar/saint… #poetry #event #HispanicHeritageMonth

patch.com/connecticut/vernon… #poetry #event

A Poem by Kathleen Holliday paddockreview.com/2026/09/24… #poetry #nature #sea #whales

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Questions of Loss by Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   The poems in Questions of Loss traverse an arc of loss from youth to adulthood: relationship endings, death, fertility and infertility, intimacy, motherhood, changing health in middle age, intersecting with loss within wider communities and in concert with the earth. Layered into these reflections is an homage to Emily Dickinson, with respect for her steady gaze and artful rendering of the experience of loss. #loss #poetry #nature #motherhood   Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen is an author, editor, and book collaborator whose work has appeared in Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Peauxdunque Review, Epiphany Magazine, Ocotillo Review, Odet Journal, Newfound Journal, and other publications. She is the author of Oblation, forthcoming from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio and winner of the Osprey Award for Fiction. facebook.com/www.kaitlinmurp…; kaitlinmurphy.org   Instagram:@kmurphyknudsenauthor . PRAISE: . Murphy-Knudsen offers a stunning meditation on how absence shapes a life. These poems confront love and death, the body and motherhood, private griefs and shared wounds with Dickinson-like steadiness that turns loss into something both devastating and luminous. —Laura Kepner, Author, Managing Editor of Odet Journal (2016-2020) . We were lucky to see poems and fiction from Kaitlin Murphy-Knudsen come across our submissions threshold, and even luckier to publish them more than once—including the poems in this collection, “Fountain of Youth, St. Augustine, Florida,” and “Heat.” Reading Questions of Loss as a complete collection confirms what was evident from the beginning: This is a poet willing to endure “the violence of beauty as it soars and weighs through a moment,” and to record what remains after the soaring. Murphy-Knudsen writes from midlife’s fault lines—where grandmother, daughter, mother, patient, and witness converge. In these pages, loss is bodily and exact. Even where despair enters and in less capable hands would write an easy script, these poems insist on something messier, truer. Sentiment, irony, and platitudes have no place in such fierce truths. Questions of Loss is a book that does not protect itself from the braided contradictions and difficult expressions of living. It offers its oblation—and trusts the reader to feel the rope in their own hands. —Tad Bartlett, Managing Editor, The Peauxdunque Review (2018 – 2024)   Please share/please repost  #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

New from Finishing Line Press: Sogni d’oro by Elizabeth Alfonzo   On SALE: finishinglinepress.com/produ…   In her debut chapbook, Sogni d’oro, Elizabeth laments the death and dying of close family members through the natural and physical worlds to create space for vulnerability and explore the nuances of grief. Can a person be prepared for death or the loss of a loved one? The poems ask questions and, when not sufficiently answered in Catholic teachings or Italian traditions, Elizabeth seeks refuge in nature with the hope for spring despite a seemingly lasting season of winter. Through observation, Elizabeth transports the reader as she draws on the strength from these natural elements, music, and everyday objects holding meaning and recording time. Tankas, haibuns and tanka prose are the chorus throughout the chapbook. Here is a place of remembrance, to pause on the details of a life, and ask for forgiveness. #grief #loveandloss #italianheritage #nature #diversifyyourbookshelf   Elizabeth Alfonzo is a poet, reader, cinephile, appreciator of art and authentic connection. She is a practicing physical therapist in Connecticut. Her poems have been published in Caesura, Please See Me, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Here, Waking Up to the Earth Anthology, Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Literary Anthology, The Paddock Review, Two Cardinals Literary and The Northeast Coast.  . PRAISE:   Elizabeth Alfonzo’s Sogni d’oro is a lullaby and elegy as tender and mournful as warm family memories cast in sunbeams after rain. The loving intentions, movements, habits, and hobbies of aging, declining family elders are captured here in poignant and powerful imagery and juxtapositions. There is pain and grief, “I apologized / for the way death was coming”, but there is also the ultimate achievement– “how all the shared love / fulfilled their lifelong dream.” Sogni d’oro evokes and recognizes all of that shared love through a very personal poetic journey of accompanying dear ones through their last days.–Katherine E. Schneider, Author of I Used to Remember the Story of How and Breaking the Fever.   Sogni d’oro is a stunning debut poetry collection — both a tribute to, and meditation on, family, aging, and loss. Alfonzo’s poetry has the ability to crystallize life’s harshest truths. Somehow both universal in nature and highly specific at the same time, this is a book for anyone who has loved deeply and been forced to say goodbye, anyone who has had to endure “the way death was coming / early, a question / without answer.” –Tim Stobierski, Author of Dancehall . With clear-eyed, attentive poems, at once tender and skillfully restrained, Elizabeth Alfonzo’s moving debut chapbook, Sogni d’oro, is an elegiac meditation on the final days and eventual loss of two grandparents. “There may have been a way to escape death /,” she tells us, “but I didn’t know the route.” This is a poet with keen observation and poetic capabilities able to create beauty out of grief and art even out of a heart’s malfunction: “An electrical impulse burning / through its own sheath— // chordae tendinea plucked by a quartet, / quickening the rhythm of the SA node.” Sogni d’oro announces a strong new voice in poetry. –Luisa Caycedo-Kimura, Author of All Were Limones Please share/please repost  #FLP #preorder #poetry #booktok #poetrytiktok

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: Dumpster Fire Heart by Allie Coker   On SALE:    finishinglinepress.com/produ…   For anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a breakup, the five stages of grief may not be enough. Sometimes you have to rage against the dying light, express every hidden thought, say goodbye several times, and fall in (and out of) love all over again. No platitudes or vague promises can soothe the raw wounds—and maybe that’s ok. In defiance and encouragement, this collection explores what it sounds like when you feel the entirety of your feelings and allow yourself to wallow in the tender places. Turning a lens of frank honesty on both the writer and her subject, Dumpster Fire Heart is a journey of one person trying to define what living looks like after her heart has stopped beating. It’s about recognizing the ugly ways in which we hurt each other and the lengths we must crawl to in order to heal. #grief #heartache  #love #healing  #poetry    Allie Coker holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her works have appeared in various publications including the Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She has also had the pleasure of participating in residencies, retreats, and conferences with VCCA, Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities, Writeaways, and NCWN. Dumpster Fire Heart is her third book. She lives in Chapel Hill.   PRAISE:   In Dumpster Fire Heart, Allie Coker probes the raw emotions of fresh heartbreak with insight and humor. “The absence of you creates more churn than the presence of you ever did,” she writes in “The Proof of Love,” evoking the afterimages that appear in the wake of a breakup. Grief dominates, but not in a saccharine way. Her true-to-life imagery illuminates the poignancy of ordinary moments when colored by loss. Bittersweet but not bitter, this witty collection wraps a tight hold on your attention and doesn’t let go. -Culley Holderfield, author of Hemlock Hollow   Allie Coker‘s latest collection, “Dumpster Fire Heart,” doesn’t merely explore the aftermath of a broken relationship. It serves it up in chunks of tightly written poems that take us on a journey of emotions – regret, anger, grief, loss, emptiness, fear, self-doubt – each so raw you could tear it with your teeth and watch it bleed. This is poetry that is relatable and deeply human, written by a poet unafraid of vulnerability. Anyone experiencing a breakup, especially in the incendiary climate of the world in which we live, will find a kindred spirit here – and an effectual torch for the heart’s darkest refuse. –Libby Swope Wiersema, author of The Season of Terminal Cold   “Coker’s sharp, searing poetry collection lays out the jagged-edged end of a relationship. She masterfully balances anger and ache, raw candor and clever wordplay, vivid observations and smack-you-in-the-gut final lines. Coker’s poetry digs into your heart and stays there.” –Rebecca Bendheim, author of Coming Out Party   Please share/please repost  #flp #booktok #poetry #chapbook

David Lee Garrison is the author of the poetry collection, Tailfins, which will be published by Finishing Line Press in November and can be pre-ordered now. He was recently featured in an article in the Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH): daytondailynews.com/lifestyl… #poetry #chapbooks #recommended #booktok

Thank you to Poets House for showcasing our recent titles: poetshouse.org/wp-content/up… #books #poetry #recommended