Join us for an evening of poetry featuring visiting writer Allison Blevins, MTSU Write director Amie Whittemore, and local poet Mikayla Elias.

Allison Blevins is a queer disabled writer.  She is the author of the collections Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVox, 2022) and Slowly/Suddenly (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021).  Cataloguing Pain (YesYes Books, 2023), a finalist for the Pamet River Prize, is forthcoming. She is also the author of the chapbooks Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022), Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), part of the Robin Becker Series. Her collaborative chapbook fiery poppies bruising their own throats (Glass Lyre Press) is forthcoming. Allison is the Founder and Director of Small Harbor Publishing, the Executive Editor at the museum of americana, and the co-organizer of the Downtown Poetry reading series. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. For more information, visit allisonblevins.com.

Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books, 2023), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University, where she directs MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program.

Mikayla Elias is a queer author from Nashville, Tennessee who writes free verse poetry. Amidst the responsibilities of their day job as an audio engineer, they have published the poetry collection Bending Toward the Light. They also have been featured in EnbyLife, samfiftyfour, Roi Faineant, Ouch! Collective, and Pile Press.