Katherine Gaffney • Book Signing & Talk

Join Ernest & Hadley Booksellers as we welcome poet Katherine Gaffney for a poetry reading, signing, & discussion of her book, Fool in a Blue House, featuring poet Jessica Kidd, on November 17 from 5:30-7:00 PM.

RSVP on Eventbrite to secure your spot!

Fool in a Blue House crafts carefully appointed rooms, both interior and exterior, alongside familial and romantic love, loss and near loss of beloveds, selves, and even neighborhood rabbits. Dwelling in contradictions-strength and fragility, humor and heartbreak, safety and threat-this book ponders impossibilities as solutions to its own predicaments, "Perhaps it would be easier to write in a chorus." But these poems know that this is not the cure. These impossibilities are simply "a whole herring" dropped down a throat, a momentary pause before we dare "to defy what the sky tells us" and instead begin to tell "ourselves that we can will the sky to give."

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. She has attended the Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, the SAFTA Residency, and the Sewanee Writers Conference as a scholar. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published at Finishing Line Press. Her first full-length collection, Fool in a Blue House, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry.

Event date: 

Friday, November 17, 2023 - 5:30 pm to 7:00pm

Event address: 

1928 7Th St

Tuscaloosa, AL 35401-1829