PYGMALION - Allison Joseph + Kimberly Mack + Gabriela Garcia

Join us for an evening of poetry and prose from acclaimed authors Allison Joseph, Kimberly Mack, and Gabriela Garcia.

Allison Joseph is a poet, professor and editor. She currently serves as the director of the MFA Program at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she is also the editor of the literary journal Crab Orchard Review. Her latest books of poems are Lexicon (winner of the Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference Best Book of 2021) and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry). She is the widow of the late poet and editor Jon Tribble.

Kimberly Mack is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her recent book, Living Colour’s Time’s Up, is part of Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 book series. She is also the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), which won the 2021 College English Association of Ohio’s Nancy Dasher Award and was a finalist for the 2022 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie First Book Award. Her public-facing and scholarly articles and essays have appeared in Longreads, No Depression, Hot Press, PopMatters, Relix, African American Review, Popular Music and Society, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and elsewhere.

Gabriela Garcia is the author of the New York Times best-selling novel Of Women and Salt, (Flatiron Books, 2021), named one of the best books of 2021 by Cosmo, Boston Globe, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, and Marie Claire, among others. Her fiction and poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. The daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, Gabriela was raised in Miami and is currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.