Local poet Dustin Brookshire is joined by visiting writer Denise Duhamel for a reading from their latest collections. Sponsored by Punch Bucket Lit, the event will be followed by audience Q&A and author signings.

"Dustin Brookshire's Repeat As Needed begins with “When I was Straight,” one of the most moving and memorable poems of the last decade. Like many of the poems in this collection, it is an “after poem” inspired by a poem of the same name by Maureen Seaton. In a terrifying time, as rights of LGBTQIA+, women, immigrants, and differently abled people are being systematically dismantled by the current administration, this book is more important than ever."
—Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House

"Only Denise Duhamel could have written these poems. Pink Lady takes a common but often overlooked subject—the decline of an elderly parent—and finds in it all the meat of the human heart. Duhamel shares not just the painful moments but the intimate, the illuminating, and the joyful. And all along we have the humor of the speaker and her resilient mother who complains of the ‘wackadoodle’ in the White House and the COVID-induced absurdity that forces her nurses to suit up like astronauts. Forget Gideon’s Bible; it’s Pink Lady that should be in every hospital nightstand."
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship and the author of four chapbooks: Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, May 2025), Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He is a co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023) and editor of When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton (Harbor Editions, 2024).  His poetry has appeared in numerous journals, read on NPR and other radio stations, featured in Georgia Poetry in the Parks, and earned Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. Find him online at dustinbrookshire.com.

Denise Duhamel's (she/her) most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pitt Poetry Series, 2025), Second Story (2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Which (2024) is a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Prize. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored six collections, the most recent of which is Tilt (Bridwell Press, 2025). Her work with Julie Marie Wade includes The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Small Harbor Publishing, 2025) and The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.