An Afternoon with Julie Marie Wade, Denise Duhamel, and Jan Beatty

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event.

Who’s your hero? What television show did you binge-watch, even before “binge-watching” was part of our vernacular? For Julie Marie Wade, the hero is Mary Tyler Moore, the television show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. From its premiere on Nick at Nite in 1992 until the death of its eponymous lead actress in 2017, this nonfiction novella follows our protagonist from her pre-teen years in Seattle through tenure at an academic institution in Miami—a journey modeled in surprising, tender, and humorous ways on Mary’s own journey from Roseburg to Minneapolis, to the WJM newsroom and beyond.

In In Which, Denise Duhamel travels “the road not taken,” as Frost put it. Or actually, she cruises up and down the many byways and highways and could-have-beens. In these poems of speculation and wonder, often she doesn’t become a poet at all. Instead she’s a stand-up comedian or a hairdresser or an urban planner or prisoner in a Handmaid’s Tale America. Sometimes she’s not here at all, having already drowned at six or drowned in alcohol as a young woman. The poems in In Which indulge fantasies both hilarious and terrifying. Duhamel takes on the question of identities and how, through myth-making and erasure, we forge a life.In Which is a winner of the Rattle chapbook contest.

Dragstripping, Jan Beatty’s seventh collection of poems, takes readers to the literal dragstrip, the metaphorical dragstrip of the body, and the strip club, where the ecstatic is rescripted and where women disappear and reappear in the crosscut of gender. Transgressing into and out of poetic form, Beatty writes the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech, mixing the real and unreal, and finding elation in a strange and shifting land.

Julie Marie Wade is the author of many collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2023) and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Julie teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University and makes her home with Angie Griffin and their two cats in Dania Beach. Her newest project is The Mary Years, winner of the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize selected by Michael Martone and forthcoming from Texas Review Press in Fall 2024.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Pink Lady (Pittsburgh, 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 is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
Jan Beatty is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently The Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Prize. Beatty has worked as a waitress, in abortion clinics, and in maximum-security prisons and is professor emerita at Carlow University, where she directed the MFA and creative writing programs and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.

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