Virtual Poetry Reading: "origin story” by Gary Jackson (w/ Esther Lee & Yona Harvey)

We’re looking forward to virtually hosting poet Gary Jackson, author of the recently released collection origin story, this October! He’ll be joined for a reading by Esther Lee, author of Sacrificial Metal, and Yona Harvey, local author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love.

You can order origin story, Sacrificial Metal, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love on our website! Check out our site here to view all of our upcoming events and local partnerships, purchase books directly from our inventory, and place orders for books we don’t currently have in stock.

This event will be hosted on Zoom. You’ll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 10/14. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

Praise for these books:

“In origin story, Gary Jackson delivers a work of beauty and talent. Like so much honey down our throats, he channels the voices of his mother, his grandparents, his family, and his encyclopedic knowledge of comics to create a new and necessary universe. It challenges racism and carried assumptions while creating an honest dialogue that ultimately ends with connection and compassion. These poems are where the body becomes word.” —Juan J. Morales, author of The Handyman’s Guide to End Times: Poems

I see Sacrificial Metal as a collection of letters to the self as though the self were a familiar stranger who speaks all the same languages, and happens to also be a scientist interested in the nature of time. This is a correspondence in which the world, and a person’s understanding of its many forms of data, is rigorously contemplated and recorded. “Where am I in your body now,” asks a poem. It’s a beautiful question, one that bears repeating. Esther Lee writes worthy poetry that reveals a keen mind, as well as a spirit that is as intelligent as it is compassionate. —Tarfia Faizullah, author of Seam and Registers of Illuminated Villages

“Harvey (Hemming the Water) explores in her striking latest the relationship between freedom, social justice, and the lyric imagination. Spanning a variety of literary forms, from prose poems and lyric fragments to sonnets, the work in this frequently gorgeous collection is unified by its concern with cultivating and articulating a collective consciousness….Readers will be captivated by Harvey’s voice and vision.” ―Publishers Weekly

About the poets:

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, Gary Jackson is the author of the poetry collections origin story (University of New Mexico Press, 2021) and Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010), which received the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He’s also the co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Publishing, 2021). His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Callaloo, The Sun, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Copper Nickel. The recipient of Cave Canem and Bread Loaf fellowships, he’s also been published in Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology and was featured in the 2013 New American Poetry Series by the Poetry Society of America. He’s an associate professor at the College of Charleston where he teaches undergraduate creative writing and in the MFA program, and serves as an Associate Poetry editor at Crazyhorse.

Hailing from the American South, Esther Lee now lives and travels on a 35’ sailboat with her husband, Michael, and their cat, Bowie. A Kundiman fellow, she is the author of the chapbook, Blank Missives, (Trafficker Press) and her first poetry collection, Spit, which received the Elixir Press Poetry Prize and nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her second collection, Sacrificial Metal, was selected by Conduit Books & Ephemera for their Minds on Fire Open Book Prize and received a 2020 Florida Book Award.

Yona Harvey is an American poet and recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her first poetry collection, Hemming the Water. Her second poetry collection, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, is available now from Four Way Books and wherever books are sold. She is also among the first black women to write for Marvel Comics. She won the inaugural Lucille Clifton Legacy Award in poetry from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the Carol R. Brown Achievement Award from the Heinz Foundation. Yona’s work has been published and anthologized in many publications including Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING, A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry and The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, followed by a collaboration with Coates on Black Panther & The Crew. Her interests and writings in nonfiction recently led her to teach a workshop for Creative Nonfiction magazine: “Writing Away the Stigma for Young Adults,” designed for teens writing about their mental health experiences.