In person: Dobby Gibson book launch with Carmen Giménez

Milkweed Books, Graywolf Press, & Rain Taxi Review of Books present DOBBY GIBSON and the launch of his newest collection Hold Everything, in reading and conversation with Carmen Giménez. This is a bookend event of the 2024 Rain Taxi Twin Cities Book Festival.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In his latest collection, DOBBY GIBSON explores the strangeness of the everyday with fresh urgency, inviting us to reawaken and reclaim our fuller selves. Hold Everything moves at the speed of breaking news as it makes a plea for grace in a world running short on mercy. Its epistolary poems put us in correspondence with Edo-period poets and 1980s hair-metal gods, artificial intelligence and hotel soaps. Gibson’s poems remain on alert, demonstrating the many ways a deeper attention to the marvels and horrors of the contemporary world can form a kind of civil disobedience. Hold Everything gathers up the harbingers of our turbulent world as it reaches for hope and evinces wonder.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

DOBBY GIBSON is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Hold Everything with
Graywolf Press, which will be available in October 2024. Gibson’s poems have
appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, the Paris
Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among many other publications. He’s
served on the Board of Directors of The Loft Literary Center, and recently joined the
Board of Directors of The Anderson Center at Tower View. He lives in Saint Paul,
Minnesota.

CARMEN GIMÉNEZ is Director and Publisher of Graywolf Press. She is the author of numerous poetry collections including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry, and Be Recorder, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, she served as Publisher of Noemi Press for twenty years.

ABOUT THE SPONSORS

MILKWEED BOOKS is owned and operated by Milkweed Editions, an independent literary press. Our mission is “to identify, nurture, and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.” Milkweed Books provides a space for this engagement, offering books we have published as well as books published by other presses we admire. We prioritize originality, marginalized voices, and books exploring our relationship to place and the more-than-human world. We are a resource for the neighborhood growing around us, a site of connection, community, and exploration.

GRAYWOLF PRESS is a nonprofit literary publisher of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and work in translation. Graywolf publishes risk-taking, visionary writers who transform culture through literature. When writers are free to do their most ambitious work, their books serve as portals to new possibilities and enable deeper understanding between people. Readers are changed by Graywolf’s books, which are fearlessly acquired, attentively edited, and energetically promoted.

RAIN TAXI REVIEW OF BOOKS a literary organization that fosters engagement with innovative writing through programs and publications. Our main vehicle is the award-winning print quarterly Rain Taxi Review of Books and its corollary Online Edition, which each have unique material that connects readers to books of merit that might otherwise get overlooked. With coverage of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, art, graphic novels, translations, and more, Rain Taxi exists for readers and writers, literary publishers of all shapes and sizes, booksellers, educators, and kindred spirits who want books to keep flourishing in a distracted society. Rain Taxi also organizes the Rain Taxi Reading Series and the annual Twin Cities Book Festival, both of which bring literature to life and provide a public celebration of the literary arts.