Poets Adam Gellings and Nathan Lipps will join us for a reading, followed by a conversation with Suzanne Richardson.

Adam J. Gellings is a poet & instructor from Columbus, Ohio. He received his MFA from Ashland University & his PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he was the recipient of a fellowship from the Marion Clayton Link Endowment. His poems have appeared in numerous journals & magazines including the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Copper Nickel, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Willow Springs & elsewhere. His debut poetry collection Little Palace was released in fall 2022 by Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

In his debut poetry collection Little Palace, Adam Gellings gives readers a perfect example of that often-repeated but rarely achieved instruction: “show, don’t tell.” These sophisticated poems wander through the busy streets of Paris, past quiet courtyards full of flowers, into a kitchen that smells of fresh-baked bread. This metropolitan yet nostalgic collection brings the reader into new places and experiences while reminding them of familiar truths about human connection, the fugitive feeling of travel, and the universality of art.

Nathan Lipps is the author of Built Around the Fire and the chapbook the body as passage. Born and raised along the rural coast of western Michigan, he currently lives in Ohio and works as an Assistant Professor at Central State University. His work has been published in the Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Cleaver, EcoTheo Review, North American Review, TYPO, and elsewhere. Nathan is the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship, an Excellence award in Research (Binghamton University), and a Poetry Fellowship (WSU) and was a Suzzanne Wilson Artist-in-Resident (GAAC).

His book Built Around the Fire delves into notions of place, the enveloping wonder and plight of our environment, and the complexities of rural culture: an examination of hierarchies, conservatism, generational religion, and the perpetuation of patriarchal norms. Such concepts are juxtaposed with a personal narrative: the rise and failure of a relationship, the deafening silence that arrives within any new vacancy, and the eventual need to learn to adapt in order to grow. These two themes—the notion of a midwestern place and its ideologies, and the notion of a failed relationship— work in tandem to speak for a shared struggle. The small family farm is dying out and the personal relationship dies right alongside it. What remains is a chance at rebirth, change, a looking outward, finally, as much as a looking inward. Though there is brokenness, and pain, there is also hope.