Poetry & Prose: An Evening with Steve Scafidi & Devin Kelly

Join us for an evening of poetry and storytelling rooted in the beauty, mystery, and resilience of Appalachia, featuring acclaimed poet Steve Scafidi and novelist Devin Kelly.

Steve Scafidi’s newest collection, The Appalachian Sea, explores the eponymous place of mountains and story, of rivers and magic, as well as of mortality—where people work and live and die. What began as an homage to the painter Miles Cleveland Goodwin became a celebration of the spectral qualities of place and home. In these poems, the Shenandoah wends, old farmers toil, and ghosts wander a land where change comes on like a flood. Haunting, tender, and enduringly human, The Appalachian Sea sings of the temporary persistence that makes what surrounds us beloved and strange.

Scafidi is also the author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, For Love of Common Words, The Cabinetmaker’s Window, and To the Bramble and the Briar. He works as a cabinetmaker and lives with his family in Summit Point, West Virginia.

Devin Kelly, a poet, teacher, and essayist from New York City, will read from his debut novel Pilgrims, out this November. The story follows a monk who leaves his monastery to search for his teenage brother, who has run away in the middle of a cross-country race. Alternating between each brother’s perspective, Pilgrims traces their paths through the Appalachian landscape and beyond, capturing the ache of loss, the grace of forgiveness, and the quiet holiness of connection. Praised by Hanif Abdurraqib as “rich, immersive, and textured” and by Bud Smith as “one of the greatest novels of this new century,” Pilgrims marks the arrival of a striking new voice in American fiction.

Free and open to the public.

Books by both authors will be available for purchase and signing.