Justin Cox, Alyssa Perry, Hilary Plum, and Zach Savich are coming to Ithaca from the midwest, having written extraordinary books of fiction, poetry, and memoir-for-performance. For this genre-blurring event, our four talented visitors will each read from their new books, all published within the past year, and then Tompkins County Poet Laureate Dan Rosenberg will lead a Q&A.

Justin Cox’s debut collection of poetry, Stock Pond, catalogs ecological and social impacts of industrial agriculture in the rural and the remote. Justin teaches at the University of Iowa and has been a fellow at the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand.

Alyssa Perry is poetry editor at the Cleveland Review of Books and an editor at the small press publisher Rescue Press. Her debut collection of poetry, Oily Doily, offers music as intricate and remorseless as its subjects: empire, centuries of bourgeois kitsch, 80s flicks, tech strip-mining our curiosity, sympathy, and desire for solidarity.

Hilary Plum, author of five books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the acclaimed Hole Studies, will read from her new novel, State Champ: the lucid, strange, and deeply metal story of a woman risking her life and finding her own way to protest the end of abortion rights.

Zach Savich, author of many award-winning works of poetry and prose, will read from his new book of memoir-for-performance, A Field of Telephones. This endlessly surprising book combines fictional lectures, performance texts, archival hijinks, and the personal, considering how “influence” can offer more than critical ventriloquism and how a “student” is one whose disorientations can reorient the field.