Three Award-Winning Able Muse Authors Read - Free Admission for All

Able Muse Authors Reading

Date: Wednesday, May 19, 7-8 P.M. EDT

Join us for a virtual reading and Q&A with three acclaimed, award-winning Able Muse Press authors--

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About the Readers:

- Melissa Balmain: Winner, Able Muse Book Award 2013 with Walking in on People (Able Muse Press, 2014);
- Ellen Kaufman: House Music: Poem; Double-Parked, with Tosca Able Muse Press, 2012) ( respectively from Able Muse Press in 2014 and 2021).
- Rob Wright: Last Wishes: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2021).

Melissa Balmain is a writer, teacher, and recovering mime. She edits Light, America’s longest-running journal of light verse. Her full-length poetry collection, Walking in on People, was chosen by X.J. Kennedy for the Able Muse Book Award. Her new, shorter collection is The Witch Demands a Retraction: Fairy-Tale Reboots for Adults, illustrated by Ron Barrett (Humorist Books). Balmain's poems and prose have appeared in such places as the American Bystander, American Life in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, McSweeney's, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and the Washington Post. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has described her work as "an infectious, often hilarious blend of the sweet and the lethal, the charming and the acidic." Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten has called it "extremely irresponsible.”

Ellen Kaufman’s latest poetry collection is Double-Parked, with Tosca (Able Muse Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award. Her first collection, House Music, was also a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award (Able Muse, 2013)—a poem from that book won the Morton Marr Poetry Prize awarded by Southwest Review, where it also appeared. Her poems have also been published by Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Salamander, Shenandoah, the Yale Review, and other literary magazines. Twice a MacDowell Fellow (2009 and 2013), she holds an AB from Cornell, and MFA and MSLS degrees from Columbia University. Formerly a poetry reviewer for Library Journal, she now reviews for Publishers Weekly. She lives near Straus Park in upper Manhattan.

Rob Wright, after working for three decades in film production, has now chosen to spend his time writing. He currently serves as associate fiction editor for Able Muse, and has been awarded three Fellowships in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has published fiction, reviews, and poetry in Able Muse, Angle, Big City Lit, the Evansville Review, Measure, Rattle, String Poet, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. A finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, he recently was awarded the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry and was honored to give a reading at the home of Frost in Derry, New Hampshire. His debut poetry collection, Last Wishes, was a finalist for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award (Able Muse Press, 2021).

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About the Host:

Sally Thomas: Motherland: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020)

Sally Thomas was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1964, and was educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of Memphis, and the University of Utah. She spent some years living in the American West and in Great Britain before settling in North Carolina, her current home. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water (2015) and Richeldis of Walsingham (2016), both from Finishing Line Press. Over the last two decades, her poetry and fiction have appeared in Dappled Things, First Things, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, Southern Poetry Review, the New Yorker, the Rialto, and other journals in the United States and Great Britain. Her debut poetry collection, Motherland, was a finalist for the 2018 Able Muse Book Award (Able Muse Press, 2020).

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Free Admission for All. Sign-Up Required.