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Literati is pleased to welcome Anna Lena Phillips Bell and Monica Rico in support of their recent collections.

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In her debut collection, Anna Lena Phillips Bell explores the foothills of the Eastern U.S., and the old-time Appalachian tunes and Piedmont blues she was raised to love. With formal dexterity—in ballads and sonnets, Sapphics and amphibrachs—the poems in Ornament traverse the permeable boundary between the body and the natural world.

“Ornament is a kind of tribute album. The poet, who is also a banjo player, pays tribute in many poems to the old-time music of the Carolinas, and like the music, her poems are marked by bursts of lyric beauty, deft storytelling, and haunting set pieces.”—Geoffrey Brock, author of Voices Bright Flags and judge

“Bell’s formal virtuosity and luscious wordplay have the lightest of touches. The poems feel as if a winged being brushed by, leaving her readers subtly changed. Whether she’s writing about slugs mating or wasps returning to a nest destroyed, she is in sync with the wild world, yet burnished by love.”—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst

“Brilliantly melding influences from Blues and Appalachian music to Dickinson and Frost, the adept, bold poems of Ornament offer praise and homage to the beleaguered, beautiful environments of the American southeast and of a poet’s soul. This is the kind of carefully built and deeply understood poetry that engages experience in a transformation so thorough it becomes kinetic, changing our felt sense of how the world moves.”—Annie Finch, 1990 winner of the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award

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The Twisted Mouth of the Tulip is Monica Rico’s debut chapbook. Praise for the book:

“How fine it is to have Monica Rico’s poems in the world. They are fierce, smart, fleshy and transcendent, animal and incarnate. Somewhere in Ms. Rico’s cloud of witnesses, Jim Harrison, hungry and hirsute, sits to the comida –a feast of gamy feeds, green shoots, buckets of wine and usquebaugh — tamales and cajeta, dulce de leche fresh from the word horde.”—Tom Lynch

“Monica Rico celebrates food and birds and the work her people do in Saginaw, Michigan. She celebrates the lives of Mexican Americans and then celebrates the influence of Jim Harrison. But there is also a beautiful and redemptive anger in her poems. “I am a simple little bird,” she writes, “brown and white like a sparrow/common enough that no one/will notice the nails/I’ve stomped into my shoes.” Watch out, reader! Monica Rico has walked into town! Her poems will tell you necessary things you didn’t know you needed.” – Keith Taylor

Literati is pleased to welcome Dustin M. Hoffman in support of his debut short-story collection, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist. Dustin will be joined for this reading by Chris McCormick, author of Literati Cultura selection Desert Boys.

Rare voices in fiction, the lives of the working class consume this collection. Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist brings to life the narratives of midwestern blue-collar workers. In these sixteen stories, author Dustin M. Hoffman invites readers to peek behind the curtain of the invisible-but-ever-present “working stiff” as he reveals their lives in full complexity, offering their gruff voices—so often ignored—without censorship.

The characters at the heart of these stories work with their hands. They strive to escape invisibility. They hunt the ghost of recognition. They are painters, drywall finishers, carpenters, roofers, oil refinery inspectors, and hardscapers, all aching to survive the workday. They are air force firemen, snake salesmen, can pickers, ice-cream truck drivers, and Jamaican tour guides, seething forth from behind the scenes. They are the underemployed laborers, the homeless, the retired, the fired, the children born to break their backs. One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist initiates readers into the secret nightmares and surprising beauty and complexity of a sweat-stained, blue-collar world.

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collection One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He spent ten years painting houses in Michigan before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University. His stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Phoebe, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, Witness, Quarterly West, The Journal, Gargoyle, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Indiana Review, and a bunch of other neat places. He lives in South Carolina and teaches creative writing and literature at Winthrop University.

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Desert Boys is the winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award from the American Library Association. This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner’s world – the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful – and most fraught – connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.

A luminous debut, Desert Boys by Chris McCormick traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.

Chris McCormick was raised in the Antelope Valley. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. His fiction and essays have appeared in the Atlantic, Tin House, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and The Offing. He lives in Ann Arbor.