An Afternoon of New Poetry with Bridget Bell, Matthew Gellman, Jennifer Jean & Michelle Whittaker (in person at HVWC)

Bridget Bell teaches composition and literature at Durham Technical Community College in Durham, North Carolina. All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy is her debut poetry collection.

Matthew Gellman’s first book, Beforelight, was selected by Tina Chang as the winner of the 2023 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2024. A 2023–2024 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Matthew has also received awards and honors from Brooklyn Poets, Adroit Journal’s Djanikian Scholars Program, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Narrative, The Common, North American Review, Indiana Review, Waxwing, Lambda Literary’s Poetry Spotlight and other publications. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and currently lives in New York. Night Logic, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of Tupelo Press’ 2021 Snowbound Chapbook Award published by Tupelo Press. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.

Jennifer Jean was born in Venice, California. She is the author of VOZ, The Fool, Object Lesson, and Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. She’s the editor of Other Paths for Shahrazad: a Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Arab Women (Tupelo Press, 2025). She’s received honors from DISQUIET, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems and co-translations have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, On the Seawall, the Los Angeles Review, The Common, and elsewhere. Jennifer is an organizer for the Her Story Is collective and she is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet–the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program. For more information, visit: http://www.jenniferjeanwriter.com

Michelle Whittaker is an American poet of West Indian heritage and the author of Surge which was awarded a finalist medal for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards (great weather for Media). She has been published in places such as New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Shenandoah, Upstreet, Pank Magazine and received a Pushcart special mention, Cave Canem fellowship and New York Foundation of Arts fellowship in poetry. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the program in writing and rhetoric at Stony Brook University.

Anout the Books:

Bridget Bell’s All that We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy offers support to current mothers, mothers-to-be, family members of people suffering from perinatal mental illnesses, OB-GYNs, nurses, and any other healthcare providers. Bell uses various poetic forms to shed light on the challenges that come with motherhood, including the physical and emotional challenges of childbirth while celebrating the beauty of women’s strength and resilience. Written with deep care and fearlessness, Bell’s debut collection is both an educational tool and a powerful component of recovery in that shares others’ similar stories.

Beforelight explores queer childhood as a site of rupture and queer coming-of-age as a process of both becoming and unbecoming. With wisdom and grace, the speaker in these poems confronts the impacts of fragmented relationships and trauma on his nascent identity, ultimately committing to the self’s authenticity as the highest form of devotion. Lush, cinematic, and deeply psychological, these poems grapple with the fragility of our most formative connections—familial, communal, and ancestral—as the speaker searches for communion with himself and tries to discover how not to “make a life out of pain.”

“In Beforelight, Matthew Gellman’s astonishing and sensitive début collection, family narratives unfold with the clarity and mystery of a photo album. Illuminating the brutal silences and blanketing snows of the suburbs, Gellman’s poems make the world of memory startlingly intimate and alive.” — Richie Hofmann, author of A Hundred Lovers

“I am moved and startled by the intensity of Beforelight, which is bent on retrospection, and profound in its careful examination of the family and the ways we are both beholden to and estranged from them. These poems also give voice to the necessity of declaring one’s individuality, and in doing so, they combine sophisticated, psychological insight with rich, original musicality. This is a daring, memorable new voice in American poetry, and a spellbinding debut.” — Mark Wunderlich, author of God of Nothingness

Where do you live? أين تعيش؟ (Arrowsmith Press), a “correspondence in poetry” and a peace-building project which Jennifer Jean co-wrote and co-translated with Iraqi poet Dr. Hanaa Ahmad. Read all about the collection here:
Michelle Whittaker’s Spoke the Dark Matter is an intimately carved, haunting window into the speaker’s Jamaican American heritage and her struggles with illness, healthcare, and romantic relationships. Examining decisions and challenges, in hindsight, Whittaker invites us to ask our future selves: How much does quietly submitting to injustice cost? How do we endure? How do we reconnect with resilience? Spoke the Dark Matter examines and redraws a “quiet surge of dystopia,” considering how the choices we make are so often entangled with our economic hardships. Whittaker’s collection is a quest through the divine, natural, emotional, and disrupted ecologies.

“Michelle Whittaker writes poems that are appealing for their intense scrutiny of origins, the natural world, and language. Reading this book is less an exercise in finding points of relatability but a calling forth to inhabit a rich and compelling imagination that may change how you see the world around you.”
–Major Jackson, author of Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022