Join us for a night of poetry with authors Katie Hartsock, Dunya Mikhail, and Ellen Stone. This event will be moderated by authors Rachel Nelson and Onna Solomon.

This event will include a poetry reading centered on the theme of discovery, an audience Q&A, and a book signing.

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About Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them:

Poetry gathers our lives, containing everything we hold inside. If poetry is a container, a place to gather what keeps us alive, what feeds our joy, and eases our sorrow, it is a communal basket, and it is often held by women.

Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them is a collection of poems exploring what women hold, what they keep, and how they let go- of sorrow, loss and grief. Using the natural world as buffer, Ellen Stone writes poems exploring motherhood and mental illness, sexual assault, marriage and parenthood-as well as how loss filters down through family generations. The poems investigate daughters leaving home while trying to carry home within them. The moon is the mother in the book, waxing and waning, but always there, always coming back around.

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/b...

About Ellen Stone:

Ellen Stone taught in Kansas and Michigan public schools for 35 years while raising three daughters with her husband. She advises a poetry club at Community High School, co-hosts a monthly poetry series, Skazat! and edits Public School Poetry in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Ellen is the author of Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them (Mayapple Press, 2025), What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020), and The Solid Living World which won the Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press chapbook prize in 2013. Ellen is 2024 Good Hart Artist Residency alumni. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net.

About Wolf Trees:

The forestry term wolf tree for a large specimen with spreading branches—“prominent and self-isolating,” just as “[b]eing a good diabetic is lonely work”—is a central conceit in Katie Hartsock’s second full-length collection, Wolf Trees. Hartsock muses on classical and modern figures (such as Hermes, Thetis, John the Baptist, Wyatt Earp, Dervla Murphy, Jane Jacobs), family, motherhood, the wolf and coywolf, glucose tablets, and the lot of the diabetic “in a body that would have perished years / ago” if not for medical advances. Through loss and hope, trials and triumphs, and the challenges and blessings of life and living, Katie Hartsock’s Wolf Trees uplifts the spirit.

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/b...

About Katie Hartsock:

Katie Hartsock's second poetry collection, Wolf Trees (Able Muse), received the Philip H. McMath Poetry Prize and was one of Kirkus Review's Best Indie Books of 2023. Her work appears widely, in journals such as Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, Tupelo Quarterly, Image, and RHINO. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the major graduate Hopwood Award, and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Northwestern University. A finalist for the 2025 Vassar Miller Prize, she is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Oakland University in Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor with her family.

About Tablets: Secrets of the Clay:

In her marvelous new poetry collection Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, Dunya Mikhail transforms the world’s first symbols—Sumerian glyphs that were carved onto clay tablets—into the matter of our everyday contemporary life. Each of the ten sections in her book is composed of twenty-four short poems, and each poem combines both text and drawing.

In her note to the collection, Mikhail writes, “I practiced at least two layers of translation in these tablets: the first from words in one language, Arabic, to another, English; and the second from words to images. What I received from my ancestors are offerings of the future rather than of the past. Now it’s my turn to offer them to you.”

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://www.schulerbooks.com/b...

About Dunya Mikhail:

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer whose journey spans countries, languages, and poetic forms. Born and raised in Baghdad, she migrated first to Jordan, then to the United States, where she made a new home in Michigan. Her writing moves between Arabic and English. Her latest poetry collection, Tablets: Secrets of the Clay, transforms ancient Sumerian glyphs into contemporary meditations and was partially adopted by UNESCO as a sticker. Her nonfiction book The Beekeeper was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her debut novel The Bird Tattoo was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Mikhail has been recognized by the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing and is a recipient of the UNESCO Sharjah Prize, as well as fellowships from the United States Artists, Guggenheim, and Kresge Foundations.

About the Moderators:

Rachel Nelson is a Cave Canem fellow and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program. Her poems have appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Muzzle Magazine, Thrush, and elsewhere. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her partner and their dog.

Onna Solomon is an Ann Arbor writer, social worker, and library enthusiast. Her poetry chapbook Disorder was published by Press 34. She has contributed writing to a range of publications such as 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Dunes Review, Hobart, The Ann Arbor Observer, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, among others. Her poem “Autism Suite” was awarded Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. She studied English literature and creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and completed her Master’s in Creative Writing at Boston University. In her spare time, she thinks up ways to gather people together through Stubborn Joy Society, a (somewhat imaginary) collective committed to joy as an act of survival.