Mackenzie Kozak, Brit Washburn, & Michael Dechane will visit City Lights for a poetry reading on Saturday, August 9th at 3:00pm. We'll celebrate Mackenzie's debut collection, no swaddle, selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the Iowa Poetry Prize.
Mackenzie Kozak is the author of no swaddle (University of Iowa Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Missouri Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Mackenzie serves as an associate editor at Orison Books and works as a grief therapist in Asheville, North Carolina. Find her online at mackenziekozak.com
Brit Washburn is the author of the essay collection Homing In: Attempts on a Life of Poetry and Purpose (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2023), and the poetry collections Notwithstanding (Wet Cement Press, 2019) and What Is Given (Wet Cement Press, 2025). She is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan, where she was born and raised, and of Goddard College in Vermont. Brit has been awarded an artist's grant by the Vermont Studio Center and for many years served on the boards of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the Low Country Initiative on the Literary Arts (LILA). She co-directed the salon Poets House South and has worked as a freelance writer, editor, and indexer, a Montessori teacher, and instructor in the Great Smokies Writing Program at University of North Carolina Asheville. She is the mother of four and a student in the MFA program at Virginia Tech where she currently teaches. Her work can be found in print and online via www.britwashburn.com.
Michael Dechane is a poet who carves wooden spoons and indulges his passion for historic home renovation. A “word-tender and wonder-vendor,” he is the author of The Long Invisible (Wildhouse Publishing, 2024). His poetry has appeared in Image, Southern Poetry Review, Spiritus, Bellingham Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Lake Effect, and elsewhere. In 2020, he was awarded Ruminate’s Broadside Poetry Prize. He serves as the VP of Communications on the Board of the North Carolina Poetry Society. With his partner, Regan, he is an owner-custodian of a home built in 1900 in a cove forest on the French Broad River north of Asheville, NC. Learn more at www.michaeldechane.com.
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