Gabriel Fried and A. Kendra Greene @ Skylark Bookshop
“We are thrilled to welcome long-time Friend of Skylark Gabriel Fried to the shop on Tuesday, March 18, to celebrate the launch of his beautiful third poetry collection, No Small Thing.
The collection is already getting some stellar raves. Consider this from poet Paula Bohince: “A preternatural intelligence infuses No Small Thing as Gabriel Fried climbs and descends childhood’s lattices of fear, wonderment, and becoming. These quietly profound, radiant poems crystalize those sensations with a playfulness and technical brilliance that feel like a kind of faith. They glimmer and refract into parenthood, an age with its own questions and awes… A superb collection.”
Gabe will be joined by A. Kendra Greene, who will be reading from her stunning new collection of essays from Tin House books, No Less Strange or Wonderful.
It’s going to be a night to remember!
Gabriel Fried is the author of three collections of poetry, Making the New Lamb Take, The Children Are Reading, and No Small Thing. He is also the editor of an anthology, Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems. He lives in Columbia, where he is Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Missouri.
A. Kendra Greene is a writer and book artist. She is the author and illustrator most recently of No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays (Tin House) and The Museum of Whales You Will Never See. Her work has come into being with fellowships from Fulbright, MacDowell, Yaddo, Dobie Paisano, and the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard.
Columbia College Presents Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Poet and author Jennifer Maritza McCauley will discuss her work with a special emphasis on the short story collection "When Trying to Return Home." She will discuss the stylistics of the collection as well as craft. There will be a Q&A session and book signing after the presentation. This event is free, open to the public and available on Zoom.
March 19, 2025
6:30 p.m.
New Hall Event Space, Columbia College Campus
Virtual: ccis.zoom.us/j/84949144423
Jennifer has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo, and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
City of Refuge Poem-A-Thon
Website Link: https://cityofrefugecolumbia.org/event/poem-a-thon/
“City of Refuge Poem-a-thon: a 30-day writing challenge in support of our refugee neighbors!
Commit to writing something down every day for 30 days. Join City of Refuge as we learn the healing power of sharing our voices in new ways through the varying lenses of language, culture, experiences, relationships, identity, and resilience. Here’s how it works:
Sign up and set a fundraising goal
Rally your friends and family to sponsor you (we recommend $30 per sponsor, which is just $1/day!)
Write! We’ll send an optional prompt to your inbox each day, and you’ll get the opportunity to share your work if you’d like (we’d love to see it!)
In addition to writing for 30 days, participants will have several in-person opportunities to write, share and connect with each other at the following events:
March 7th 6-9pm, First Friday in the Catacombs, North Village
March 21st 8-10am, Creative Mornings at the Montminy Gallery in the Boone Historical Center and Museum
April 4th 6-9pm, First Friday in the Catacombs
April 10th, City of Refuge Sip ‘n Shop”
Mizzou’s Visiting Writers Series: Evie Shockley
Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
Mizzou’s Visiting Writer Series Colloquium Event: Evie Shockley
Professor Evie Shockley is the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U Iowa P, 2011) and six collections of poetry, most recently suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). Among her earlier books, the new black (Wesleyan UP, 2011) received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; semiautomatic (Wesleyan UP, 2017) received the same award in 2018, and was also a finalist that year for the LA Times Book Review Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
Shockley's intellectual and creative work takes a variety of forms. Her current research on "Black Graphics" concerns the strategies Black poets and other artists (literary and visual) have employed during the recent period characterized by the dominance of "colorblindness" ideology. Articles related to this project have appeared in New Literary History, The Black Scholar, and Contemporary Literature. Other scholarly and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century African American and African Diaspora literatures, Black feminist thought, and contemporary poetry and poetics in the US and beyond. She has placed numerous essays on these subjects in academic journals, edited volumes, and broader audience publications, such as How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill; Furious Flower: Seeding the Future; The New Emily Dickinson Studies; Harriet; The Fate of Difficulty in the Poetry of Our Time; LARB; Literary Hub; The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry; Jacket2; and Boston Review, among others. Since 2021, she has served as Editor for Poetry (scholarship) at Contemporary Literature. Her poetry has appeared nationally -- in publications like Kenyon Review, Obsidian, Poem-a-Day, The 1619 Project, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Adi, Lana Turner, Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Torch Literary Arts, and Poetry Daily -- and internationally, with pieces translated into French, Spanish, Polish, and Slovenian. Honors for the body of her poetry include the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize.
Mizzou’s Visiting Writers Series: Jamel Brinkley
Jamel Brinkley is the author of the short story collections Witness, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize; and A Lucky Man, a finalist for the National Book Award, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and winner of a PEN Oakland Award and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
Unbound Book Festival
The Unbound Book Festival brings nationally and internationally recognized authors of world-class renown to Columbia, Missouri, to talk about their books, their work, and their lives.
Bailey Gaylin Moore presents THANK YOU FOR STAYING WITH ME, Saturday, March 1 @ 6:30 p.m.
“We’re very pleased to welcome Bailey Gaylin Moore to Skylark to celebrate her brilliant book of essays, Thank You for Staying With Me, on Saturday, March 1.
Urgent, meditative, and searching, Thank You for Staying with Me is a collection of essays that navigates the complexities of home, the vulnerability of being a woman, mother-daughter relationships, and young motherhood in the conservative and religious landscape of the Ozarks. Using cosmology as a foil to discuss human issues, Bailey Gaylin Moore describes praying to the sky during moments of despondency, observing a solar eclipse while reflecting on what it means to be in the penumbra of society, and using galaxy identification to understand herself. During a collision of women’s rights, gun policy, and racial tension, Thank You for Staying with Me is a frank and intimate rumination on how national policy and social attitudes affect both the individual and the public sphere, especially in such a conservative part of the United States.
Bailey Gaylin Moore is an Ozarks-based writer who lives with her husband and son in the heart of Missouri, where she is amassing a plant collection for her cat to shamelessly destroy. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the online nonfiction series Past Ten, which asks contributors to consider where and who they were ten years ago. Her work has appeared in HuffPost, AGNI Magazine, Pleiades, Wigleaf, Willow Springs, Hayden's Ferry Review, and other journals. Thank You for Staying with Me is her debut essay collection.”
Miller Conversations on Literary Publishing: Jericho Brown
The Missouri Review presents award-winning poet Jericho Brown as part of the Miller Conversations on Literary Publishing. Brown will speak about his experience while writing, editing, and promoting The Tradition, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2020. This free event will be held in person at the Memorial Union on the Mizzou campus. Don't pass up this exceptional opportunity!
OneMic Collective Presents: irRESISTible
Come on out to Hitt Rex (10 Hitt St) on Wedneday, February 26th for OneMic Collective’s irRESISTible.
Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Reading Series: Black Voices - Spoken Word Open Mic
“Calling all poets, writers, hip hop and other wordsmiths to share your work live at Orr Street Studios for our 2nd Annual Spoken Word, Open Mic event, “Black Voices”. Hosted by local hip hop artist and painter, Sergio Slayer.
This two-hour event will be packed with powerful stories and passion. The sign up to perform opens at 6:30, first come, first served. We have limited space so show up early! We are giving a platform for your voices to be heard.
Light refreshments served. Alcohol free event.”
Matthew Morris presents THE TILLING @ Skylark Bookshop
“The tragic mulatto,” wrote the African American poet Sterling Allen Brown in a 1933 meditation on stereotype, “is a victim of a divided inheritance”: pulled this way and that, belonging nowhere. In 10 lyric essays shifting keys from Virginia, where he grew up, to Tucson, his first home as a young man, Matthew Morris sounds the depths of that embodied cliché: its fracturing simplifications, its (partial, mixed) truths. The light-skinned son of an African American father and a white mother, he asks after the skin-housed present by way of the rooted past, considering his late grandmother, a painter whose grandparents left Due West, South Carolina for Evanston, Illinois in the decades before her birth; the twice-made film Imitation of Life, which in its first iteration starred the light-skinned actor Fredi Washington; and the quiet gradations of color in an untitled Rothko print. Ever-searching, The Tilling is an excavation of identity and a reflection on the beginnings of life and love—a (sometimes soft, others chippy) biracial coming of age.
Son of an African American father and a white mother, Matthew Morris writes through questions of race, identity, family history, and love. His nonfiction has been published in Seneca Review, Fourth Genre via the Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize, and Mid-American Review through the AWP Intro Journals Project, and he has received a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His essay “Tidal Wave,” published in apt, was cited as “notable” in Best American Essays 2020. He is a graduate of the University of Arizona MFA program and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Missouri –Columbia.
Matthew will be joined this evening by Sara “Eszi” Waters, who will also read from their work. Eszi is a poet, essayist, and parent at the University of Missouri – Columbia working towards their PhD in English/Creative Writing. Eszi’s work has been published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Shelia-Na-Gig, and elsewhere. Their essays have been longlisted for a C&R Press Publication Prize, and their poems were longlisted for the Palette Poetry Love & Eros Prize. Their work explores connection to place, deep ecology, trauma and lineage, absurdity and estrangement. They are particularly interested in hybrid genre writing.
MU Poetry Society Open Mic Reading
Every first Wednesday of the month, we'll be having an open mic for artists and performers to share their work. Poets, Musicians, and Standups welcome, no experience required. Free to enter, signups start at 6:30 at the door and the show starts at seven! If you miss signups, there's a lightening round at the end where anyone who wants to get up has the chance to!
Mizzou’s Visiting Writers Series: Corinna Cook
Corinna Cook is the author of Leavetakings, an essay collection (University of Alaska Press, 2020). Her essays blend research with reverie and have previously appeared in publications such as Flyway, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ocean State Review, and Alaska Magazine. Corinna’s critical writing appears in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies and New Writing: The International Journal for the Theory of Creative Writing. She writes about teaching for Pedagogy and American Literary Studies, and her freelance work appears in publications including Terrain.org, Essay Daily, and Yukon North of Ordinary.
Corinna is a former Fulbright Fellow, an Alaska Literary Award recipient, and a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Project Awardee. Her current projects-in-progress include an essay collection about Alaska-Yukon arts and histories (project origin story here), and a public history collaboration with Marie Adams Carroll about the early years of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.
Corinna holds degrees from Pomona College and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and she earned a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She serves as core nonfiction faculty in Alaska Pacific University’s low-res MFA program in creative writing, and offers consultation and developmental editing services through her humanities microbusiness, Outer Point Essays.