Hell Yeah

The author will be in conversation with poet Danielle Pafunda

Rachelle Toarmino’s highly anticipated second collection of poems is an intimate, ecstatic examination of the wonders of common speech. As automatic and wholehearted as a “hell yeah” between friends, poems explore the interpersonal—work emails, doctor’s office customs, long-distance calls, and Yahoo! Answers rabbit holes—to measure the strange, mundane, and ancient ways we relate and respond to one another. With curiosity, generosity, oddball intellect, and charm, Hell Yeah captures that gut impulse to say “Yes,” and sing it.

“ A stunning collection … assured, restless, generous, loving, funny, plaintive, and high-octane.” —Peter Gizzi

Hailing from Niagara Falls, Rachelle Toarmino is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah (Third Man Books, 2025) and That Ex (Big Lucks Books, 2020), as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science (Sixth Finch Books, 2025), winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of ten books including Along the Road Everyone Must Travel selected by Hoa Nguyen as the winner of the 2023 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, Spite (The Operating System), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), translated into Spanish by the writer Cristina Rivera Garza as Las Chicas Muertas Hablan al Unísono (Dharma Books). Other work appears in American Poetry Review, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, Conjunctions, the Texas Review, and others. Pafunda teaches creative writing, literature, queer and gender studies, and worldbuilding at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Buy your books at Ampersand and join the conversation!

Books by Rachelle Toarmino

Books by Danielle Pafunda

This is a hybrid event in-person at Writers & Books, 740 University Avenue
Rochester, NY and streamed via Zoom.

For Zoom tickets only please click HERE.

This project is made possible with funds from the Aid to Localities Program through the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts.

Choose the ticket price that’s right for you: Free, $5, $10, $15 or $20