Poetry and Barbeque

Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife, a New York Times “New & Noteworthy” book released by Louisiana State University Press in February 2019. Rathburn’s poems have appeared in the nation’s most esteemed journals, including Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In March 2019, Rathburn was appointed poet laureate of Georgia.

James Davis May is the author of Unusually Grand Ideas, forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in February 2023. His previous collection. Unquiet Things, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2016 and named runner-up for the Georgia Author of the Year Award in poetry. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Mercer University, where he directs the creative writing program, and a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry.

Barbara Hamby is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo. Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.  She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times.. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.

David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University. Among his many awards are the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Florida Humanities Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing.  Kirby’s many books include I Think I Am Going to Call My Wife Paraguay, A Wilderness of Monkeys, and More Than This.