Join us in the bookstore at 3pm for readings from Maria Zoccola, Katie Condon, Hannah Smith, and Pierre Minar
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University and has spent several years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 is her debut poetry collection.
Katie Condon is the author of Praying Naked, winner of the Charles B. Wheeler poetry prize (OSU / MAD CREEK BOOKS 2020). Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and American Poetry Review, as well as the 2025 Best American Poetry Anthology. Condon is the recipient of a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the 2023 Nadya Aisenberg fellowship from MacDowell, and served as the Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University from 2019 - 2020. Condon holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Houston, and a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee. She is an assistant professor in the English department at Southern Methodist University, where she teaches creative writing and edits a line of poetry for Project Poëtica / Bridwell Press.
A Dallas native, Hannah Smith works as a contributing writer and production manager at Southwest Review and at Deep Vellum Publishing as the Poetry Editor. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Ohio State University, and a BA in History from Stanford University. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Image Journal, and elsewhere. Hannah is the co-author of two collaborative chapbooks, Metal House of Cards (Finishing Line Press, 2024) and Astral Gaze (dancing girl press, forthcoming). Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writing Conference and Yaddo Residency.
Pierre Minar was born in Lebanon and grew up in New Jersey. His work has appeared in Hobart, a collection called Giant Robot Poems by Middle West Press, and a chapbook called Transmissions From My Yearning Chair by Bottlecap Press. When he is not writing poems he investigates Medicare fraud by big companies on behalf of the government. He lives in Dallas with his son.
