Celebrate poetry with the Georgia Center for the Book as we welcome poets Greg Emilio, Gale Marie Thompson, and Stephen Wing to read from their new collections. Registration requested.

About Greg Emilio and Kitchen Apocrypha

Gregory Emilio is a poet and food writer from southern California. His poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, North American Review, [PANK], the Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review. He holds an MFA from the University of California Riverside, and a PhD in English from Georgia State University. A mean home cook and avid cyclist, he lives in Atlanta and teaches at Kennesaw State University.

Gregory Emilio’s Kitchen Apocrypha delves richly and sensuously into food as sustenance, ritual, pleasure, and temptation. Drawing upon his food service experiences, Emilio contemplates hunger, abundance, community, and solitude through the lens of culinary arts. He navigates meals ranging from sacred family recipes to unassuming roadside diners, sprinkling biblical and mythological allusions throughout. Central to his narrative is a deep reverence for food’s power to nourish not just the body, but the spirit and human connection as well. A finalist for the 2021 Able Muse Book Award, Kitchen Apocrypha offers a feast both earthy and sublime.

About Gale Marie Thompson and Mountain Amnesia

Gale is the author of Mountain Amnesia, (Colorado Prize for Poetry, 2023), Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020), Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015) and two chapbooks, Expeditions to the Polar Seas (Sixth Finch, 2013) and If You’re a Bear, I’m a Bear (2013). Raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Gale holds a B.A. from the College of Charleston, an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, where she received the Robert H. West Award. She is the founding editor of Jellyfish Poetry and lives in the North Georgia Mountains, where she directs the Creative Writing program at Young Harris College. Her work may be found in Gulf Coast, Guernica, jubilat, American Poetry Review, BOAAT, Crazyhorse, and others. Gale has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and her poems have received prizes including Best New Poets and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. Her manuscripts have been shortlisted for contests including the National Poetry Series, Cleveland State University Poetry Prize, Akron Poetry Prize, Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize, Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, and the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award She has worked on the editorial teams of jubilat, Crazyhorse, the Fairy Tale Review, Slope Editions, and the Georgia Review. Her research and teaching interests include Documentary Poetics, Poetry Sequences, Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, and Literature of the Holocaust. Her doctoral research considered issues of marginalization in structures of memory, including gender and racial/national identity, with a concentration on long poems and poem sequences, documentary poetics, and hybrid forms. 

The poems in Mountain Amnesia rebuild a new world—and self—in the wake of destruction and loss. Influenced by the landscape of rural Appalachia, these poems depict a nature relentlessly working on its own disappearance for survival. Decaying plants and animal remains are housed in the same world as ramps and bellflowers on the cusp of blooming. These poems do not placate or cover up the inevitability of death, but rather use this knowledge to seek connection and make meaning: “how little and yet / how much it matters to count the dead.” Mountain Amnesia seeks a path through destruction, using ruin to clear the way for new beginnings; or, as Thompson writes, “the painful, florid bloom of passing forward.” This collectionis a testament to survival and resilience, and animal encounters—the lonely fox, the folded fawn, the returning whale, the emerging voles—become new myths along the way.

About Stephen Wing and Wild Atlanta

Poet, activist and author Stephen Wing lives in Atlanta with his wife Dawn Aura, two cats, and two wise old pecan trees. His poetry, fiction, essays, and workshops draw on his lifelong relationship with nature to help seed a much-needed evolutionary shift.

For over a decade, Atlanta poet Stephen Wing has been exploring the city’s many hidden pockets of wild nature with a group of fellow poets. The poems in Wild Atlanta: Greenspaces & Nature Preserves of ‘The City in the Forest' offer a sampling of the riches he has found there–treasures worth preserving as the city expands its footprint of concrete and powerlines. Photographer Luz Wright has captured portraits of the magical places depicted in Wing’s poems through the unique perspective of her lens. The result is a luminous collaboration of word and image, imagery and vision, natural beauty and human imagination. Atlanta’s urban wilderness is calling!