On the eve of National Poetry Month, come celebrate the joy of words with three award-winning poets who are launching new books onto the national literary scene. Geffrey Davis, Keetje Kuipers, and Erika Meitner will read poems from their newest collections, touching on topics as diverse as parenthood, fly fishing, and the complicated love for one’s home place. Expressing gratitude with grace, and mixing sorrow with fierce joy, these three fearless voices are a powerful reminder of what words can still do.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA Editions 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm(BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. Other honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published by Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Nimrod, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches with the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and with The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program. He also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, including, Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Poetry Foundation bestseller. Her second collection, The Keys to the Jail (2014), was a book club pick for The Rumpus, and her third book, All Its Charms (2019), includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her work has appeared in over a hundred journals, including Narrative, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Orion, and The Believer. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. Kuipers has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, among other honors. She now teaches at Seattle’s Hugo House and serves as Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner, Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2015, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and she has also received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.