Poetry Showcase at Carmichael's

Join us to hear from the latest releases from Conyer Clayton, Acie Clark, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Parker Hobson, and John James.

About the Authors:

Conyer Clayton is a queer writer from Louisville, Kentucky living between Canada and the U.S. South. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award), and many chapbooks. Conyer’s fiction has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and a McCormack Writing Centre Scholarship. the lake-shaped excuse is their third book.

Acie Clark is a multi-disciplinary wrtier from Florida and Georgia. His work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center and the Collegeville Institute, selected for Best New Poets 2025, and anthologized in Divinity in the Margins, I Witness, and The Florida Anthology. His manuscript, Small Talk, was the winner of Hub City’s 2025 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, selected by award-winning poet Derrick Austin. The collection works in both lyric and narrative traditions of trans poetics to explore addiction, religion, southern identity, and the natural world. It will be published in Fall 2026.

Rebecca Gayle Howell is a poet writing new myths for climate change. Her genre-bending work has received critical acclaim from outlets like Poetry London, Ms. magazine, and The Los Angeles Times, and she has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and German. Among her awards are the United States Artist Fellowship, the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry. Her latest book is Erase Genesis, just out from Project Poëtica / Bridwell Press.

John James is the author of two books and three chapbooks, among them The Milk Hours (Milkweed, 2019), Extinction Song (Tupelo, 2026), and The Delusion of Being Absolute, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2028. His poems appear in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. He lives in Louisville, where he is a member of the Sublimity City poetry collective.

Parker Hobson writes poems and songs in Kentucky. His poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Bat City Review, and elsewhere, and his writing has been supported by fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and from the University of Kentucky. He is also a songwriter, and his latest full-length album, Loss Program, came out in 2024.