Poetry Trio | Geffrey Davis, Keetje Kuipers, Erika Meitner

BOA poets Geffrey Davis, Keetje Kuipers, and Erika Meitner will read from their new collections. Davis is celebrating the publication of his second book, the James Laughlin Award-winning Night Angler. Kuipers will debut her third collection, All Its Charms, which contains poems that were chosen for inclusion in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. And Meitner will present her fifth, Holy Moly Carry Me, which recently won the National Jewish Book Award. All three collections find the poets at the place where family, identity, and country intersect. How do we make a family—and reinvent what family can be—while living in a land we love but that we’re not sure loves us back? These three poets take on the task of answering with poems that plumb the depths of compassion, grace, and a fiercely won sense of joy.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of All Its Charms (BOA, 2019), The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), and Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Narrative, Tin House, Orion, and The Believer, as well as The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She has been a Wallace Stegner fellow, Bread Loaf fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Kuipers is Senior Editor at Poetry Northwest.

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner, Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. In 2015, she was the US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast, and she has also received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing. 

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA, 2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Revising the Storm (BOA Editions 2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. His honors include the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center. His poems have been published in Crazyhorse, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and The Rainier Writing Workshop low-res MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He also serves as the poetry editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.