Join us for a reading with Jenny Molberg, Roger Reeves, and Kathryn Nuernberger (left to right, below).

Refusal, Jenny Molberg’s second collection of poetry, draws on elements of the uncanny—invented hospitals, the Demogorgon of Dungeons and Dragons, an Ophelia character who refuses suicide—to investigate trauma, addiction, and patriarchal forces of oppression. A sequence of epistolary poems looks to friendship as a safe haven from violent romantic relationships, and a series of poems that address a mother’s struggle with addiction looks at the complicated nature of a parent-child relationship affected by alcoholism. Refusal seeks to break silences in the wake of the #metoo movement, and to interrogate a cultural misogyny that weighs on a woman’s position in the world.

Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (forthcoming, LSU Press). She is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment and her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Missouri Review, Poetry International, Indiana Review, Boulevard, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and edits Pleiades magazine.

Roger Reeves is the author of the poetry collection King Me (Copper Canyon) and recipient of honors and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Bread Loaf, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and Cave Canem. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He earned his MFA from the Michener Center in 2010 and his PhD in English from UT’s Dept of English, and he previously taught at University of Illinois/Chicago.

Kathryn Nuernberger’s Rue is a book of about prairies. A book about rural America. A book about the science and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control. It is a book about an affair, a breakdown, and also it is about love. Rue is a book about everything that might be possible between us once we have decided to tell the truth of our lives. Poems from this collection have appeared widely in journals including 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Field, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry International, West Branch, Willow Springs, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two previous poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. She has also written a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA, H. J. Andrews Research Forest, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life, she teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.