As much as anyone might plan for a poetry reading, you can never fully anticipate the crowd, or the mood, and wow did we luck out for our Rethinking Gender event, as it was an absolute delight in every way. The room was full of friends, current and former students, future friends, future students, colleagues, and some students who were probably required to be there but (hopefully) had fun nonetheless.

It was such a thrill reading with Holly. We’d never read together before (people thought we had!) but co-taught an amazing poetry workshop for a semester, so maybe that’s how we got our synergy. At any rate, we left ourselves plenty of room to choose poems on the fly for our braided reading, and it worked out quite well. Holly shared a bunch of poems from her NEOMFA thesis, and I read poems from my three most recent books. We could have read for two hours, not one.

Many thanks to everyone who attended (not an empty seat, some standing!), and if you weren’t able to make it you can hear Holly Brown read at the next Big Big Mess. Poetry lives, folks. It really does.