Writers Reading: Abigail Chabitnoy, with Melissa Dickey, Hannah Brooks-Motl, and Joan Tate

Description

Presented in partnership with the Amherst Business Improvement District, Writers Reading is a curated series featuring local authors. In our next installment of the reading series, join us for a line-up curated by featured writer Abigail Chabitnoy. Fellow authors Melissa Dickey, Hannah Brooks-Motl, and Joan Tate will join Chabitnoy in sharing selections from their work. See author bios below. This event is free to attend and open to all. Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (Wesleyan 2022); How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). She currently is an Assistant Professor at UMass Amherst and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts low-residency MFA program. Abigail is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. Find her at salmonfisherpoet.com. Melissa Dickey is the author of three books of poems -- The Lily Will, Dragons, and Ordinary Entanglement, which received a citation from the Mass Book Awards in 2024. She earned her undergraduate degree in writing from the University of Washington and her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Born and raised in New Orleans, she now lives in Western Massachusetts where she teaches high school and community classes, consults with rivers, raises children, and studies the tarot. Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), Earth (2019), and Ultraviolet of the Genuine (2025), named a finalist for the New England Book Award, as well as chapbooks from the Song Cave, arrow as aarow, and The Year. She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and PhD from the University of Chicago. She lives in western Massachusetts. Joan Tate is a southern poet, mystic, and transexual living in Western Massachusetts. Her work engages with questions of grace, earnesty, esotericism, and snakes. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in magazines such as Prairie Schooner, b l u s h, Discount Guillotine, Stone of Madness, and Little Mirror.