Join poets Susan Michele Coronel, Dawn Leas, and Amy Small-McKinney for an evening of readings and conversation exploring how identity is shaped—and reshaped—across a lifetime. Drawing from work shaped by loss, divorce, aging, and survival, the poets reflect on how poetry becomes a space for reckoning, repair, and renewal. The event will include readings followed by a panel discussion and audience Q&A.

About Susan Michele Coronel

Susan Michele Coronel is the author of In the Needle, A Woman (Finishing Line Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize. Three poems from the collection were nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in journals including Gone Lawn, Mom Egg Review, Nixes Mate, One Art, Pedestal, Spillway 29, and SWWIM. She is the recipient of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s 2023 First Poem Award and has been a finalist for several national poetry prizes. Her work explores feminist lineage, family, and memory. She lives in New York City.

*About In the Needle, A Woman***

In her debut poetry collection, In the Needle, A Woman, Susan Michele Coronel deftly weaves together strands of challenging life experiences, including the complexities of the mother-daughter bond, divorce, family losses, and her Jewish ancestors' past. Through captivating imagery and a lyrical imagination that accompanies us from childhood through adolescence and adulthood, In the Needle, A Woman culminates in the speaker's life as an independent woman with her own desires and needs. Through it all, the healing power of poetry helps her to mend the torn fabric of her life and to find purpose. In "Was My Mother the Ocean or a Rainstorm?" the speaker writes: "Pain nourishes me because it contains/seeds of goodness. I put on a blindfold/ & keep still. Now I don't need/ to choose. I am not afraid."

About Dawn Leas

Dawn Leas is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections, including her newest, The Sin of Being Okay (Kinsman Avenue Publishing 2025). Her poetry has appeared in New York Quarterly, Wild Roof Journal, The Paterson Literary Review, SWWIM, Literary Mama, and elsewhere. She’s a writing coach, teaching artist, and assistant director of the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative at Wilkes University. She’s also a proud back-of-the pack runner (when not injured), newish hiker, salt-water lover, and mom of two grown sons.

About The Sin of Being Okay

The Sin of Being Okay is a contemplative exploration of the everchanging landscapes of love, loss, and trying to answer who am I? The poems speak to the path forward not only being fraught with storms, but also pockets of quiet and solitude; peace and grace. They unveil a knowing that we must often walk alone through a messy and beautifully hard fog of heartache, but by doing so, there’s much to gain including redemption, forgiveness, letting go of the past, and a better understanding of/compassion for self and others.

About Amy Small-McKinney

Amy Small-McKinney is the author of three chapbooks and three full-length poetry books, including her newest full-length, & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press, 2025). Her second full-length collection, Walking Toward Cranes, won The Kithara Book Prize (Glass Lyre, 2016). Her poems have been published in numerous journals, for example, American Poetry Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Verse Daily, among others, and are forthcoming in Cultural Daily. Small-McKinney has also been published in several anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022), 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millenium (Ashland University, 2021), and most recently, Keystone Poetry, Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press, 2025). Her poetry has also been translated into Romanian and Korean. Small is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus, 2011. January 2026, Small-McKinney taught a One Art virtual workshop: Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies.

About & You Think It Ends

Poetry: & You Think It Ends begins with the quote from a Linda Hogan poem, When the Body: “When the body wishes to speak, she will.” & You Think It Ends moves from girlhood and early violence, both personal and worldwide, to motherhood, the discovery and embracing of ancestors, and finally love and acceptance of an aging self and body. The poet’s story and the stories of other women are interwoven and speak to these very difficult times we live in. By the end of the book, the poet’s body speaks to her, and she listens. Poet, Eleanor Wilner says, “Reading these poems is a passionate experience of an intensely aware, evolving consciousness––from early self-division, assault, “the airlessness of fear” at the random violence of men: “a young girl as torn paper.” Later, in a spare language with offbeat images that freshen perception, “a form found for fury,” a self is slowly reclaimed: “today, I name myself. Seen & Remembered.” Years on, by joy surprised, “Blue leans into me like new love.” And you think it ends? Read these open-hearted poems and think again.”

Contact the host of What We Carry: Poetry, Identity, and the Work of Becoming