A Grain of Sand in Lambeth + The Strange and Wondrous Works of Eleanor
The poets will read from their respective books and then have a conversation and Q&A
Help us celebrate the release of two new books by Rochester-area poets Geoffery Babbitt and Kathryn Cowles, special guests at our 2025 Poetry Festival in the Highland Park Bowl.
In A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, poetry becomes a lens through which to explore the complex, visionary world of William Blake. Drawing on Blake’s own rejection of tradition and his relentless quest to challenge the boundaries of art, Geoffrey Babbitt confronts the tensions between genius and convention, life and death, light and dark.
Selected for the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor is Kathryn Cowles’ deliciously innovative third book. Eleanor lays bare the depths of the confines still facing women in Western life, even while we’re told we’re free to choose. She affixes wings to feminine figures cut out of magazines, asks, is there a way beyond? A way to real freedom, to a femininity that looks and acts however we choose?
Geoffrey Babbitt is author of Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light and A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, which won the 2023 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Prize in Poetry. Babbitt’s poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Guesthouse, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA and PhD from the University of Utah, is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Seneca Review and Seneca Review Books, for which he founded the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book prize.
Kathryn Cowles’s second book of poems, Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, was published by Milkweed Editions in March 2020. Her first book, Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name, won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. Her poems and poem-photographs have been published in Best American Experimental Writing, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Diagram, Free Verse, Georgia Review, New American Writing, Verse, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-day, and elsewhere, and have been awarded the Poetry Society of America, Alice Fay di Castagnola Manuscript in Progress Award, and the Larry Levis Academy of American Poets Prize. She earned her doctorate from the University of Utah and is an associate professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where she co-edits the poetry and Beyond Category sections of Seneca Review.
Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation!
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This is a hybrid event in-person at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue
Rochester, NY and live streamed.
For Live Stream tickets only please click HERE.
Choose the ticket price that’s right for you: Free, $5, $10, $15 or $20
