Author Talk: Love & Literacy - Modern Love in the Year of the Fire Horse

Join Tomorrow Bookstore for a love-themed literary evening exploring all forms of love—romantic, platonic,familial, and self. Featuring award-winning poets and acclaimed novelist turned memoirist, this pre–Valentine’s Day reading and conversation will celebrate the complexity and beauty of connection.

Come for the heartache, the joy, and everything in between.

There will be a reading from each author, followed by a moderated discussion between the authors and a meet & greet. Come out, learn about these great authors and get your books signed!

About Tender Voyeur

Tender Voyeur, Donald Platt’s ninth collection, tells the story of the author’s coming out as bisexual, as related through meditations on the work of Sargent, whom several scholars now think may well have been gay, though closeted. A major ekphrastic project, Tender Voyeur features high-quality reproductions of Sargent’s paintings and drawings, interlaced with poems that interrogate the place of same-sex love at the turn of the 20th century and explore conflicting sexual desires in the different worlds of Sargent and of the author.

About The Perils of Girlhood

By interrogating the personal and emotional toll of being female, the essays in The Perils of Girlhood serve as a reckoning for women and girls. Like many girls growing up in the eighties and nineties, Melissa Fraterrigo leaned on popular culture to transition from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Judy Blume told stories about girls embracing their imperfections; Madonna encouraged bold moves. But Fraterrigo’s experiences with dating and attempts to refashion her body through diet and exercise left her feeling far from empowered.It wasn’t until Fraterrigo became a mother to twin daughters and they began their own self-criticisms that she questioned how she might help them navigate their own girlhoods. A handsome swim coach’s advances, an anxious daughter soothes her father’s temper, the history of Mace, and the joy of female friendship, are some of the memories that shape Fraterrigo’s worldview as an adult. Written with lyricism and insight, The Perils of Girlhood provides a reckoning and a reclamation. And while these personal narratives developed from Fraterrigo’s desire to guide her daughters, their universal truths compel us to consider how best to bring all of our daughters into the future.

About The Perils of Girlhood

Based on her experience as a wilderness guide for women in a substance-abuse treatment program, Mary Ardery’s visceral debut is set deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville,North Carolina. These narrative-lyric poems chronicle a labor both physically and emotionally intense: bearing witness to campfire confessions, facing uphill climbs and frigid rivers and wildfires, reckoning with relapses and overdoses. Here is a nuanced exploration of intoxication and recovery, the ways we share and manage pain, and how our personal histories can haunt us but also lead us down transformative paths. Firmly grounded in time and place, part record and part elegy, this is a book for those who have been affected by addiction and all who have ever sought solace or redemption in nature.

About Donald Platt:

Donald Platt has published eight books of poetry, including Swansdown, winner of the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize, One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020), Man Praying (Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press, 2017), and Tornadoesque (CavanKerry Press,2016). Platt’s poems have appeared in The New Republic, Nation, Poetry, Yale Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Tin House,Iowa Review, Southern Review, and Paris Review as well as in The Best American Poetry 2000,2006, and 2015. He is a recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts(1996 and 2011) and three Pushcart Prizes and he teaches at Purdue University.

About Melissa Fraterrigo:

Melissa Fraterrigo is the author of the forthcoming memoir in essays, The Perils of Girlhood(University of Nebraska Press, September 2025) and also the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press, fall 2017) and the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press). Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies from Shenandoah and The Massachusetts Review to storySouth, and Notre Dame Review. She has been a finalist for awards from Glimmer Train on multiple occasions, twice nominated for Pushcart Awards, and was the winner of the Sam Adams/Zoetrope: All Story Short Fiction Contest. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University and in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Butler University in Indianapolis. She also offers instruction on the art and craft of writing at the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana.

About Mary Ardery:

Mary Ardery is the author of Level Watch (June Road Press). Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Best New Poets, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review online, RHINO, and elsewhere. Her prose and photography appear in publications such as The Sun, DIAGRAM, The Indianapolis Review, and The Cincinnati Review online. She earned a BA from DePauw University and an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. The recipient of a Lifelong Arts Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission, she was born and raised in Bloomington and now lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with her husband, son, and Boston Terrier named Bug.

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