Kelly Grace Thomas: Future Tense w/ Angel Nafis, Ashley Pao, Charlotte Cusumano Maiorana, & Shira Erlichman

About this event

*See Event Guidelines Below* Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas’s Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman’s fight to become a mother while losing her own. Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent—a countdown. As her mother’s health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going—through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame—finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother’s death. Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood—and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life. Kelly Grace Thomas , poet, writer, and coach, is the author of Future Tense (Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She’s the winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her poems appear in: The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry, taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She holds an MFA from Randolph College. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she coaches writers online. www.kellygracethomas.com Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Angel Nafis is a writer and the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day, BLACK FUTURES, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She is the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she is The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Ashley 敏 Pao is a hybrid writer working at the intersection of poetry, nonfiction, short story, and visual art. She holds an MFA from Randolph College, where she was a Nancy Blackburn Fellow. Her work explores inheritance, nonlinearity, and the strange architectures that hold (and fail) us—often blending fragments, etymology, and dream logic. She is drawn to forms that bend: essays that behave like poems, poems that behave like maps. A collector of words, rocks, and other small obsessions, she writes toward the spaces between things. Charlotte Cusumano Maiorana is a writer from New York City and the Strategic Publishing Director at Emerald Publishing. Her work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, One Art, TIME, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from Randolph College. Writer, visual artist, and musician Shira Erlichman is the author of Odes to Lithium (2019) which won the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and is the writer-illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold: A Friendship Book (2019). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and PBS, among others. A finalist for the Lambda award and a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she runs In Surreal Life: an Online Global Creativity School and is a Visiting Professor in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA. Her debut novel Tangerapple is forthcoming from Knopf in June 2027. Her second poetry collection Is is forthcoming from Alice James Books in August 2028. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife. Event guidelines: Each ticket includes either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card. Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event. A signing will follow the talk. The conversation will be livestreamed for free online here . As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out. If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact .

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