Ian Hall w/ Creekwater Mansions

Join us for an evening with Ian Hall as he discusses his transcendent debut poetry collection, Creekwater Mansions, with FSU creative writing professor James Kimbrell.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This debut collection of poems by Ian Hall illuminates daily life for a family and community in eastern Kentucky, all the while singing with verbal delights.

Creekwater Mansions documents the intimacy of duress. A son puffs cigarette smoke down his grandad's throat because the old man is too feeble to draw breath; retired draft horses learn to dance; the land manager's hired muscle flaunts an axe-handle; a grieving family uses a coffin as a card table; schoolboys siphon gin out of shag carpet just to catch a high. These are the variations of affection and kinship, so informed by and inextricable from the macabre tedium that abides in the back pews, dialysis clinics, and County-Line Liquors of daily life in Eastern Kentucky.

While these poems are frequently ordered around grisly attitudes and occurrences, moods of indolent provincialism, and the evermore-contagious disease of despair, these are at their core love poems. Hall writes, "Those are my people. I want nothing more than to esteem them and to show outsiders that even gruesomely human moments stripped of any decoration still have the heft and horsepower to be transcendent."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. He holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he is currently a PhD candidate in English at Florida State University. He appeared on Narrative Magazine’s ‘30 Below 30’ list, and he was named the winner of the 2025 Princemere Poetry Prize, as well as the co-winner of the Kentucky State Poetry Society’s 2025 Grand Prix Contest, and the runner-up of the 2025 Vivian Shipley Poetry Award. He was named a finalist for the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Prize, the 2024 Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. His work is featured in numerous publications, including Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, and American Literary Review. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

ABOUT JAMES KIMBRELL

Professor, Ph.D., University of Missouri-Columbia, MFA, University of Virginia, M.A., Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, B.A. Millsaps College, specializes in poetry. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in anthologies such as Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize, and in magazines such as Poetry, Field, Fence, Ploughshares, and The Nation. He is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven, My Psychic, and Smote, all from Sarabande Books.

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