Reuben Gelley Newman + KC Bratt-Pfotenhauer: Dear Dear

Join us for a launch event with author and musician Reuben Gelley Newman, discussing his debut poetry collection, DEAR DEAR.
About this Event

Joining Reuben in conversation is poet and scholar KC Bratt-Pfotenhauer. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd-floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA-compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by June 17th to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]

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Winner of the 2025 Louise Bogan Award, Reuben Gelley Newman's Dear Dear renders queer love through the lens of music, art, nature, and politics. Drawing on artists from Bach to Mitski, Gelley Newman flirts with nostalgia but refuses to dwell in the past, asking how remembering our ancestors can reinvigorate our present struggles. In these poems, sound becomes the language of desire and self-expression: "I want to do better / I want to be the husband of the song." Combining playful sonnets and earnest narratives, Dear Dear searches for belonging in our grief-stricken world.

Reuben Gelley Newman is a writer, musician, and librarian based in New York City. His book Dear Dear, selected by Randall Mann for the Louise Bogan Award, will be published by Trio House Press in July 2026. He also wrote a chapbook, Feedback Harmonies (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024), in homage to the musician Arthur Russell. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Ninth Letter, Only Poems, and Salamander, among other journals.

KC Bratt-Pfotenhauer is the author of the forthcoming novella Views from a Plague Room (Querencia Press, 2026), the 2024 CNY Poetry Book Award winner Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her work has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, The Masters Review and the minnesota review, among others. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in poetry and is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at New York University.