GROVE: Nicole Callihan, Julia Kolchinsky, and Catherine Esposito-Prescott

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coconut Grove on 3409 Main Highway. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event.

Inventive and dynamic, Nicole Callihan’ s fourth poetry collection, SLIP, navigates midlife with stick in hand and tongue in cheek. As Ellen Bass writes, Callihan “ turns recurrent obsessions like children, husband, mother, laundry, time, art, and body into poems of elastic syntax and shapes– – psalms, prose, lyric, narrative.” Whether looking back at her girlhood, counting out almonds, or singing herself (yet another) birthday song, Callihan’ s luminous linguistics send us on an expansive journey. Sometimes dreamlike, sometimes raucous, these poems teach us how much can be held in a life and on the page.

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Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet’s birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.

Anchored by a series of poems that look to the moon, this collection explores displaced perspectives and turns to the celestial to offer meditations on how elements formed in distant stars account for so much of our human DNA. In these poems, writes series editor Patricia Smith, Kolchinsky “clutches at a feeling of home that is both unfamiliar and deeply treasured, longs for all that was left behind, struggles to come to terms with the rampant violence devastating a landscape that still, in so many encouraging and heartbreaking ways, belongs to her.”

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"I admire these poems for their willingness to encounter; to give us the saw-toothed shark, the microbe, the manatee, and, of course, the moon. Here is a poet who holds, so dearly, all that slips away. 'O heart, ' begins one address, 'crumb-lover, taker of any bid. For as long / as there's land to walk along, isthmus, / channel, bridge to nothing, I'll move, I'll play, / I'll scrape flint into fire.'"-Danusha Lam ris, final judge, Barry Spacks Poetry Prize "In Accidental Garden, Catherine Esposito Prescott assembles a glowing collection of poems that seam the quotidian with the ethereal; for this poet, they are one and the same. There is a gently probing curiosity to these poems, a faith pieced with wing, hedge, moon, and the tenderness of our own bodies. The poet writes: "I am a woman with a voice...that rains light." That's what these poems do above all-they shine."-Emma Trelles, author of Tropicalia and Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara"In poems both elegiac and celebratory, Prescott uses the lyric form to simultaneously center and expand her (and our) human experience. Accidental Garden takes on a global pandemic and individual illness and emerges as a handbook for survival. These poems are intimate and vulnerable but also utterly fierce and hauntingly beautiful. In each poem, I felt in the hands of a master." -Dean Rader, author of Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Works & Days

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Winner of the 2023 Tenth Gate Prize and a 2023 Alma Award, Nicole Callihan has two recent poetry collections: chigger ridge (The Word Works 2024) and SLIP (Saturnalia March 2025). Other books include This Strange Garment (Terrapin 2023), the 2019 novella, The Couples, and a new chapbook, griefbeing, from Lily Poetry Review Books. Her work has appeared in Sixth Finch, Tin House, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.

Julia Kolchinsky, Ph.D., is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don't Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, PARALLAX (U of Arkansas Press, 2025). She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.

Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of Accidental Garden, winner of the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize (Gunpowder Press, 2023), and two chapbooks. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Josephine Quarterly, NELLE, and Tahoma Literary Review. Prescott is the co-founder of SWWIM and editor-in-chief of SWWIM Every Day. In addition to her work in poetry, Prescott teaches yoga philosophy and leads yoga and writing retreats. See http://catherineespositoprescott.com

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