may, 2025
Event Details
Join us for the book release of Lady Smith by Jess Smith. Jess will be joined by local poets Katie Condon, Megan Peak, and Sebastian Páramo to celebrate the release of her book.
Propulsive and erotic, searching and incisive, Jess Smith’s debut collection, Lady Smith, explores the overlap between private and public violence.
Smith’s book is the winner of the 2023 Akron Poetry Prize and was selected by Sandra Beasley, author of Made to Explode, who writes: “The poet’s title evokes a particular model of gun, but the collection ultimately invokes something more powerful—survival instinct, a desire to devour and thrive, a dare to pleasure and be pleasured, to “pink and thick and glisten”—and the strange, unapologetic intimacies that can save someone’s life once shared. Maybe yours.”
Advance Praise:
“…Jess Smith demonstrates how an appetite for life—for full aliveness—is no easy thing to bear. After all, is it possible to “name / a body part that is not a verb”? To have teeth is to commune with the moonlight blazing across a bed that smells like the sea or sounds like one’s own heart. To have a heart—who would dare describe that? This poet, in this book, does. —Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“Lady Smith is raw and feral. These poems pulse with all the energy of a pistol, a target, and the bullet that brings them together. Jess Smith is a poet of incredible power and courage. There’s nothing she can’t write. —Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete
About the guest readers:
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, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, as well as the Academy of American Poets’ anthology 100 Poems That Matter. 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. 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.
Sebastian Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023) and was named a finalist for the Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and is Assistant Editor at Texas Review Press. He lives in Texas.
Megan Peak received her M.F.A. in Poetry from The Ohio State University, where she was former Poetry Editor at The Journal. Her first book of poetry, Girldom, won the 2018 Perugia Press Prize from Perugia Press and 2019 The John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. She lives in Fort Worth, TX with her son, Auden.
Jess Smith is the author of Lady Smith (University of Akron Press, 2025). Originally from Georgia, she is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the MFA in creative writing. Her poetry, essays, and criticism can be found in Prairie Schooner, Waxwing, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, and other journals. She received her MFA from The New School and is the recipient of support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center.
