Join us at the KickstART Gallery on Saturday, June 28th, at 7:30 pm for a book launch party with poets Mitchell Nobis and Dawn Tefft. They will be reading from their new collections, published by Match Factory Editions.
Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 public school teacher and lives in Farmington with his family and dog. He facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series for KickstART Farmington, and co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series. He is a past president of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English and former co-director of Red Cedar Writing Project, and he co-authored Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay, a pedagogical text for writing teachers. For more, see mitchnobis.com or find him falling apart on a basketball court.
Parents can be expected to know all, but they don’t have many answers in a world of constantly moving rights and wrongs. The poems in The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees embrace the wandering uncertainty of the self in a life of so many unknowns and the frustrations of enduring the knowns. These poems address the natural world, gun violence, basketball, youth, mortality, climate crisis, and the parenting anxiety raised by tangling with all of that. Mitchell Nobis is a white adoptive dad to Black sons, and his work often looks at America’s racism and various crises with both sorrow and fury. Yet, rhizomatic life maintains wonder amid chaos, and these poems bear witness to the joys alongside the worries.
Dawn Tefft‘s poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Witness. Her chapbooks include Gosling (Anhinga Press), Fist (Dancing Girl Press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). She earned a PhD in English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review. She works as a union representative in Chicago, where she raises the most wonderful child and enjoys life-affirming friendships.
Once Upon a Riot insists upon the necessity of resisting forms of oppression such as fascism and economic exploitation, while exploring both the challenges and the moments of beauty in raising a young child in our current political moment. Children and movements are both birthed, and the poet is always attuned to the music of the experience: lyrical, prosaic, experimental, narrative. The book traverses street protests often pejoratively labeled as riots by commercial media, labor strikes, playing at the beach, decorating apartments, LED light displays on bridges, James Baldwin, Taylor Swift, the Wisconsin Uprising, the film Poor Things, scraped knees, the French revolution, immigrant rights, a mother’s circumstances raising a child in the present, a mother’s own childhood, and global happenings. All is context. All is fodder for shaping what is and what is to come.