Poetry Reading with Stacy Gnall and Casey Bell! 

About the Books

Located somewhere between fiction and reality, the animals of Dogged exist as both “creatures children see in their fevers” and “your one / good dream / in the night.” Inhabiting a space apart from time and narrative, the space of the ever-elusive now, these haunting poems probe animal consciousness and desire, as “howls float / like crocuses— / violet / and half open / to the unknown.” 

“Gnall intertwines with, and submerges her voice in the voices of the animal so thoroughly that it is deliberately and wonderfully difficult to tease one from the other.  An eloquent imagination informs every page of Dogged, in which the exploration of otherness is moving, enlarging, and surprising in a way very few books are.”—Lynn Emanuel

The characters of Little Fury yearn for hope in the rubble of a broken world. Suspended between the real and surreal, Bell’s debut lingers in the slippery in-between of dreaming and waking, voicelessness and uproar, longing and belonging.

“Little Fury explores longings of both flesh and spirit, offering glimpses of what it’s like to be free from patriarchy, what it’s like to be truly free. Bell is a furiously talented, visionary writer; her stories leave me breathless, leave me believing we can make a better world.” — Gayle Brandeis

About the poets

Casey Bell's debut short story collection, Little Fury, is out now with Metatron Press. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her fiction appears in Sequestrum, Cream City Review, New South, The Boiler, Reed Magazine, The New Limestone Review and Timber. She was shortlisted for the Iowa Review Fiction Award and was a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and the Calvino Prize. Casey is the co-director of Girls Rock Reno, a music camp for self-identified girls, trans and gender-expansive youth. Originally from Philadelphia, PA, she now lives in Reno, NV with her partner, Dan, and their pug-mix, Maud. She teaches English at the University of Nevada, Reno and is the drummer and singer of the band Fine Motor. caseybellwriter.com

Stacy Gnall is the author of the poetry collections Dogged (winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry from The University of Massachusetts Press, 2022) and Heart First into the Forest (Alice James Books, 2011). A finalist for the Georgia Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in numerous journals, most recently Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, Bennington Review, and New American Writing. Gnall holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California, and is also a graduate of the University of Alabama’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Sarah Lawrence College. She is the founder and director of Wordstruck, a collective that offers creative writing programming to youth across the globe. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, she is currently Poet-in-Residence at the University of Detroit Mercy.