Join us in celebrating the launch of Kristy Peloquin’s Adrift: A Collection of Poems. With readings from Kristy and Mike Matthews.
Adrift: A Collection of Poems is an exploration of trauma and a quest for transcendence. Between broken souls, broken homes, and frustrating socio-political circumstances, Peloquin asks us to see these experiences not as disparate elements, but as part of a whole. Here, in this place, with this stirring narrator, memory and reality feed off one another, creating a world of inconstancy that can only be soothed by dreams of escape.
Kristy Peloquin is a poet, budding memoirist, teacher, and writing group leader in Austin, TX. She graduated from Texas State University with a BA in English in 2006 and went on to earn an MFA in poetry in 2009. She is a teacher at Austin Community College in Austin, Texas and co-leads therapeutic creative writing workshops for persons suffering through grief and loss. She is currently at work on a memoir about her life growing up in rural central Texas, separating from a religious sect, and surviving trauma. Reoccurring themes in her work include trauma, memory, the physical body, and spirituality in nature. Her work has been previously published in The Berkeley Poetry Review, Palimpsest: The Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, Sphere Magazine, Right Hand Pointing, and Midway Journal, among others.
Mike Matthews has been teaching college writing courses at Central Texas College in Killeen, Texas, including creative writing courses, since 2001. He has sponsored the Writer’s Club for students, and the student journal Byways, for arts and letters, since soon after he arrived to teach at the community college. Between semesters, he has worked on his poetry. He has published several individual poems, including one titled “The City of Strings,” in an anthology, The Book of Hopes and Dreams, published in Scotland. He has two collections in the final stages of development ready to submit to interested publishers. He hopes to complete and publish two books that reflect the journey from darkness to sunrise.