Evelyn Berry and Ray McManus: Reading & Signing

Join Evelyn Berry and Ray McManus at Hub City Bookshop as they discuss their new poetry collections Grief Slut (Berry) and The Last Saturday in America (McManus) on Tuesday, April 2nd at 6:00PM.

This event is free and open to the public, registration on Eventbrite comes with a book and holds a reserved seat at the event.

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About the Books:

Grief Slut

Evelyn Berry's debut poetry collection, Grief Slut, is an examination of the queer lineage of pleasure, grief, and resilience in the American South. Berry offers a portrait of a girl living through boyhood and grappling with the violence of nostalgia in poems that blend high art, archival slivers, and Taco Bell. This collection invites us into a landscape home to sloppy kissers, swamp suitors, scrappy "limbwrecked boys," and drag queens drenched in glitter sweat, where "each day is trespass" and queer youth fight to "hear one another breathe just a little while longer."

The Last Saturday in America

For fans of Americana music and a beer after mowing the lawn, The Last Saturday in America confronts the long shadow of Southern masculinity.

The Last Saturday in America is set in a nation on the precipice of great change. Through examinations of suburban neighbors, bullies, gun violence, and vasectomy appointments, Ray McManus draws a portrait of American masculinity in the face of political division, pandemic, and cultural warfare. McManus’s speaker is caught between the way he was raised and the future he wants to see for who he is raising. He can no longer rely on what he thought he knew, nor does he know what to do about it. The man rendered in these pages is a father, a son, a Southerner. And he is willing to burn it all down and start something new, only to see that the new start he is looking for has been with him the whole time.

About the Authors

Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and education. She's the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2024). She's a recipient of a 2023 National Endownment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Ray McManus is the author of four books of poetry: Punch. (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Book Award for Best Book of Poetry in North America), Red Dirt Jesus (selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Marick Press Poetry Prize 2011), and Driving through the country before you are born (winner of the South Carolina Book Prize in 2006), and a chapbook called Left Behind. He is the co-editor for the anthology Found Anew with notable contributors with South Carolina ties. His poems have been published in numerous journals such as Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, and POETRY magazine. He lives in South Carolina where he teaches for USC Sumter and serves as the Writer in Residence for the Columbia Museum of Art. Pre-order his newest poetry collection The Last Saturday in America from Hub City Press here.