Join us for an evening with Atlanta poet Beth Gylys to celebrate the release of her newest collection, After My Father: A Book of Odes. Tickets are free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

About the Author:

Award-winning author, Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University, and the co-founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars: A Journal of Literature and Art, a Mellon sponsored literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her last two full-length collections (The Conversation Turns to Wide Mouth Jars—co-written with Cathy Carlisi and Jennifer Wheelock—and Body Braille) were both named Books All Georgians Should Read. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the Birmingham Poetry Review, West Branch, The James Dickey Review, SWWIM, and on the Best American Poetry blog.

About the Book:

Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s odes to ordinary things, After My Father is an elegiac chapbook of odes that celebrate a father whose life has been made strange and extra-ordinary as a result of suffering Lewy Body Dementia. In poems such as “Ode to My Father Falling,” and “Ode to My Father’s Handkerchiefs,” we gain an intimate glimpse into the speaker’s love and grief as she portrays the progression of his disease and his ultimate death.