Bobby Elliott and Jennifer Maier — 'The Same Man' and 'The Occupant'

Third Place Books is pleased to welcome poets Bobby Elliott and Jennifer Maier. Bobby will be reading from his collection , a meditation on parenthood and memory; Jennifer will read from her collection , which explores hidden beauty and strangeness within the ordinary.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.

Please note: While RSVP helps us anticipate attendance, your RSVP may not guarantee a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served, and all events at our Ravenna neighborhood store are free and open to the public. Only standing room may be available for events with high interest.

We are happy to accommodate any accessibility concerns. Please contact us at [email protected] or call our Ravenna store at 206-525-2347.

Winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

A one-of-a-kind debut that asks what we owe those we love, The Same Man is an aching chronicle of the early days of parenthood and the wounds of the past. Haunted by memory and powered by the demands and joys of new life, Elliott’s poems wrestle with the father-son relationship at their core and the deep, unspoken harms that shape us. A relentless effort toward expression and autonomy, The Same Man is a reckoning and a balm, a rallying call and a father’s song of devotion.

The Occupant is a collection of persona and prose poems that explores the “inner lives” of common household objects, along with that of “The Occupant” of the house, their human keeper. Taken together, their shifting perspectives engage questions of time, mortality, and the nature of consciousness itself, reminding readers of the beauty and strangeness that lurk under the surface of ordinary thought—the “other world” that, as Paul Éluard noted, “resides in this one.”

Bobby Elliott's debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on September 9, 2025. Raised in New York City, he earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow and won the Kahn Prize for Teaching. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO and elsewhere. He lives in Portland with his wife and sons.

Jennifer Maier is the author of Now, Now and Dark Alphabet, which was named one of Ten Remarkable Books of 2006 by the Academy of American Poets and was shortlisted for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Plume, Southern Humanities Review, Scientific American, The Gettysburg Review, American Poet, and elsewhere. She works as a professor of modern literature and poetics, writer in residence, and senior faculty in poetry in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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