91ÉçÇø

On November 6, we will feature a joint reading with some of USF’s own talented poets to celebrate the releases of their new books.

Liz Kicak’s first poetry collection, Reliquaries, is a collection of poems both reverent and skeptical of the complex divinity of the natural world, the family, and the self. Each poem, itself a container meant to house a precious relic, delights in the mangrove, the spoonbill, the venom, and the flood. They celebrate the living and the dead, the mundane and the fantastic.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s second book, My Perfect Cognate, interrogates the connections and contrasts at the sharp edges of her in-betweens: violence and softness, motherhood and isolation, the border between the United States and Mexico, where the author and her mother were often stopped, interrogated. Written from the depths of severe post-partum depression,  Natalie Scenters-Zapico searches for a language that can hold both personal and communal pain.

Enter toggled content here.Ariana Benson’s debut poetry collection, Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. A southern Black ecopoet and storyteller, Benson has received various fellowships & awards including a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and others. Benson serves as the Assistant Director of the Ethel Waddell Githii Honors Program at Spelman College, where she facilitates creative writing and storytelling workshops for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

This event is free and open to the public. 

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their book Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions. Short Film won the Wisconsin Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Iver has received fellowships from The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from 91ÉçÇø State University.

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. His work has appeared in journals and magazines such as Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review. Other honors include an NEA Grant for Arts Projects, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, and the 2023-2024 Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. He is from the Navajo Nation and was appointed the 3rd Navajo Nation Poet Laureate. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma.