Diana Whitney, Meg Reynolds, Eve Alexandra

Join poets Diana Whitney, Meg Reynolds, and Eve Alexandra, for readings from their latest collections! Girl Trouble is an excavation of female adolescence, a brazen journey through rape culture from the ‘80s to #MeToo. Diana Whitney’s earthy poems spill secrets, make trouble, reckon with stories of desire and harm, and explore the agency and oppression of women and girls. Deeply rooted in the natural world, Girl Trouble grieves the planet’s degradation while celebrating queerness and seeking healing for the next generation. By the end, a myriad of voices builds to a full-throated roar and we feel the power and release in truth-telling. This is a book for survivors and advocates, for mothers and daughters, for anyone moving through trauma with resilience. Condition is a vivid account of early motherhood during the isolation and global intensity of the COVID pandemic. Reynolds witnesses the impossible transformations of her home, her child, and herself while reckoning with a past that overlays the act of parenting. The book is a record of an awe both astonishing and terrible in a rare language rich with metaphor and depth of insight. “To become a parent and to write this book, I had to use every tool and skill at my disposal and had to invent new ones at the moment they were needed. I drew, wrote, slept, ate, fed, found and refound a thousand toys and small items of clothing, brushed hair, had my hair torn out, largely alone. What no one witnessed, I witnessed for myself on the page.” For Reynolds, motherhood is a strange landscape of ghosts, monsters, illness, longing, and surprise. It is a wilderness where she and her family must navigate under the strange constraints of the pandemic within the walls of their small apartment and the empty neighborhood. In the absence of others, parenting is an invention and the self is an ever-changing reality. Between the poems, poetry comics, hybrid illustration, and drawn collages, Condition is a powerful collection of work that attests to hard work of love and artmaking. Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White is an unflinching book of poems—a liturgy of love, wreckage, grief, and arrival that is as visceral as it is transcendent. Rooted in intimacy, in thrall with the natural world, and run through with a sequence of charms that offer as much warning as antidote, the range in these poems is stunning—in form and subject. Alexandra’s materials—childhood, a father’s presence and loss, bodily hunger—are made new in her hands. These poems are inventive and incantatory, their language precise and alive: “My hand runs the length of the field, and the field is your torso, odd rib that caught my heart like a lacy hem.” Nature is mirror and medium, and love, a rebellion—“I am remembering how to make love. In protest.” Lyrically beautiful, but also frank, surprising, and deeply moving, this is an extraordinary collection. --Kerrin McCadden, author of Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes and American Wake Diana Whitney is a queer writer & educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Wanting It, Dark Beds, and Girl Trouble. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana lives with her family in Brattleboro, where she works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit. www.diana-whitney.com Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher from New England. An instructor in writing and humanities at Vermont Adult Learning in Burlington, her work has been published in a number of literary journals including Mid-American Review, RHINO, The Offing, Iterant, Prairie Schooner, New England Review and the Kenyon Review. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, her poetry and comic work has been three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best the Net. Her first collection of poetry comics, A Comic Year, was published in October 2021 from Finishing Line Press. Her second collection, Does the Earth, was published in May 2023 from Harpoon Books. Reynolds' poetry was published in Best New Poets 2023. Reynolds' was also the 2024 winner of Inlandia Institute's Hilary Gravendyk Prize with her collection, Condition, published in April 2026. You can read more of her work via her biweekly publications on her Substack, Condition and Other Conditions. Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White won the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize, and her first book The Drowned Girl was selected by C.K. Williams for Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Alexandra’s poems have appeared in Narrative, Barrow Street, Cape Cod Review, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Vermont.