Special Event: Barbie Birthday Reading featuring Denise Duhamel & Dustin Brookshire

Join the staff of HVWC as we welcome Denise Duhamel & Dustin Brookshire who will read poems from their poetry collections inspired by Barbie. To start off the evening, we will hear a poem each from James Allen Hall, Gregg Shapiro, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Emma Bolden, Ben Kline, and Judy Ireland. Then Dustin and Denise will read from Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023) and Kinky (Orchises Press).
Denise Duhamel is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Her most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. Denise and Amy Lemon collaborated on Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation & a Conversation (Slapering Hol Press, 2011). She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the recipient of the 2024 Jon Tribble Editors Fellowship awarded by Poetry at the Sea, and the author of the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021), and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). He’s the co-editor of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing, 2023), which was named to the 2024 “Books All Georgians Should Read” list by the Georgia Center for the Book. His poetry has been read on NPR and other radio stations, featured in Georgia Poetry in the Parks, and earned Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations. Dustin is the founder of the Wild & Precious Life Series, Limp Wrist, and the Why I Write series. Visit him at dustinbrookshire.com.