Poetry Night with Erin Adair-Hodges, Melissa Fite Johnson & Jenny Molberg
About the Event
Swing by the store on March 30 at 7 p.m. to enjoy a night of transcendent poetry, or, as Coleridge called it, the best words in the best order! Poetry Night will feature authors Erin Adair-Hodges from Kansas City, Melissa Fite Johnson from LFK, and Jenny Molberg from the University of Central Missouri.
About the Poets
Erin Adair-Hodges is the winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for Let's All Die Happy and author of Every Form of Ruin, both from the Pitt Poetry Series. Her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, PBSNewsHour, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and more. Born and raised in New Mexico, Erin now lives in Kansas City and works as a fiction acquisitions editor.
Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of Green (Riot in Your Throat, 2021). She holds a BSEd in English and an MA in poetry and literature from Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, SWWIM, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Stirring, Broadsided Press, Whale Road Review, Ruth + Moth, Rise Up Review, Sidereal, One, Midwest Quarterly, Chiron Review, and elsewhere. Her first collection, While the Kettle’s On (Little Balkans Press, 2015), and her collaboration with three other Kansas writers, Ghost Sign (Spartan Press, 2016), were both named Kansas Notable Books. She is also the author of A Crooked Door Cut into the Sky, winner of the 2017 Vella Chapbook Award (Paper Nautilus Press, 2018). Melissa and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, Kansas, where she teaches high school English. Please feel free to connect with Melissa through email here.
Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). She edited the Unsung Masters book, Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. Molberg is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com or on Twitter at @jennymolberg.
Order your books today!
Click on any of the images to learn more about our poets' featured books for the evening. Place your order today so you can get your reading in before the 30th, or pick your book up at the event!
Note: You are not required to purchase a copies of featured titles to attend our free events. But if it's within your budget, the Raven and the visiting authors would appreciate it—and you'd be helping to keep our programming free!
A rebuttal to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Every Form of Ruin posits the Erinyes’ fury as righteous, understanding Clytemnestra’s rageful response to loss, and refusing Iphigenia’s relegation to a footnoted sacrifice.
This book cannot be returned. Make sure what you're ordering is exactly what you want.
These poems tell the story of loss: loss of a father stolen by disease, loss of innocence. And while it could easily stop there this collection doesn't. Instead, it gathers strength and finds its voice and its fight. With wonder and awe and some well-placed anger, we see these poems emerge on the other side with a bit of hope and even happiness.
Jenny Molberg's third collection of poetry, The Court of No Record, serves as both evidence and testimony against a legal system that often fails victims of physical trauma and domestic abuse.