For National Poetry Month, the Library has been spotlighting several Jacksonville-based poets and showcasing some of the ways they lift up other creators. During the last week of April, we'll be sitting down with Jessica Q. Stark and Dorsey Craft. They are both published poets, creative writing professors at the University of Florida and poetry editors at AGNI, a literary magazine known “among readers around the world,” as the writers group PEN put it, “for publishing important new writers early in their careers, many of them translated into English for the first time.”
#JOIN
If you're a poet or a poetry lover, you don't want to miss this fascinating Lit Chat Interview with Jessica Q. Stark coming up on Tuesday, April 25, at 6:30 p.m. live at the Willow Branch Library (and live on Zoom).
An audience Q&A and book signing will follow the interview. We recommend pre-ordering your book from our partner San Marco Books and More to guarantee a copy. A limited number of books will also be available for purchase on-site or you can bring your own copy to be signed.
#Register to attend!
Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, forthcoming April 2023), Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020) and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). Savage Pageant was named one of the “Best Books of 2020” in The Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. Her poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Poetry Society of America, Pleiades, The Southeast Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Boiler, Tupelo Quarterly, Glass Poetry Journal, among others. She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series with Dorsey Craft in Jacksonville, Florida.
Interviewer Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder, winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her work has received support from the Sewanee Writer's Conference and the Anderson Center at Tower View. Dorsey's poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of AGNI and teaches composition and creative writing at the University of North Florida.
#JESSICA RECOMMENDS
Top three poetry books on my shelf:
- Dorothy Chan's Babe
- Carmen Jimenez Smith's Be Recorder
- Diane Seuss' Frank: Sonnets
Semi-secret favorite haunts in Jax:
- Light on the Sugar bakery for phenomenal Asian pastries and creme puffs
- Trent's Seafood for the best low-key seafood in town
- Camp Chowenwaw Park for unique, treehouse camping just outside of town
