Greg Rappleye in Conversation with Emily W. Pease

On June 25th at 6-7 PM poet Greg Rappleye will be joined by Hub City Press author Emily Pease for a discussion of Greg's latest poetry collection, Barley Child.

RSVP on Eventbrite and get a 10% discount on the book when you present it at the bookshop register!

About the Book

Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.

Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.

About the Author

Greg Rappleye is an Irish-American poet who teaches in the English Department of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is a former Bread Loaf Fellow and has published five full-length collections of poetry and several chapbooks. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Arts & Letters Prize, and the 2021 Fish Prize in Poetry (Ireland) selected by Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States. He has been published widely in the United States and in Ireland, and his work has also been presented on RTE Radio 1, Irish Public Radio. Barley Child, his fifth collection of poetry, won the Miller Williams Prize in Poetry selected by the distinguished poet and editor Patricia Smith, and was published in 2025 by the University of Arkansas Press.

About the Conversation Partner

Emily W. Pease graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in English and a concentration in journalism. She went on to receive an MA from Virginia Tech and an MFA in Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her stories have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative, and Witness. After teaching for many years at the College of William & Mary, she now teaches writing to veterans through the Armed Services Arts Partnership, where she also serves as a member of their arts council. She is currently beginning a novel about logging the last forests of West Virginia. She lives in Williamsburg, VA.