Join us for a Mother’s Day poetry celebration! We’ll be celebrating new and recent work by poets Tiffany Melanson, Jenn Givhan, Chloe Yelena Miller, Emily Mohn-Slate, and Meg Leonard.

THE FALLS is available on our website. Check out our whole ready-to-ship website, which also has a wide selection of recommended and best-selling books, store merch, book subscription boxes, and more. You can request specific books you don't see on the site through this form, too. All orders ship from our store in Pittsburgh.

Several of these writers’ books are available on our Bookshop.org list for recent and upcoming events. Check out our curated lists and picks on our main Bookshop.org affiliate page, or use the search bar in the upper center-right to look for any book. (Using the book's ISBN usually works best.)

This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 5/8. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

*

About their work:

“I never thought I’d see the Great Mexicali Novel. Jennifer Givhan teaches us new things about borders, including the shadowy borders of the mind. Intense.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels

"In Viable, Chloe Yelena Miller makes plain many of the trials women who’ve had miscarriages and women who experience postpartum depression have. Her honest and beautiful, if not sometimes raw testament makes for an important addition to literature about motherhood and about miscarriage. But I wouldn’t reduce the work to only pain. Viable offers hope and joy. After loss, after depression, Miller shows that one could still find happiness in motherhood and self. Not only pregnancy is considered viable in this book." —DeMisty D. Bellinger in her review of Viable in Mom Egg Review (April 2021)

"The Falls by Emily Mohn-Slate is a courageous book teeming with honesty and rage. These poems risk writing motherhood in wildly unpopular ways, telling the truth of mother as 'woman,' mother as 'human.' Mohn-Slate breaks the code of the status quo with slicing precision and line breaks that cut in perfect seams. This feminist voice seethes with desire, like the woman who is drawn to the falls: I wanted/to touch beauty. It was like/a tornado pulled me in. Even while the hand of something immense hangs above, Mohn-Slate breathes a love of all things. She believes anyway, she forges ahead into the red worlds of her beloved Charlotte Mew, her guide beyond the grave, who tells her: Red is the strangest pain to bear. The skillful restraint in the speaker's voice raises the stakes—this is pragmatism over a well of fury. We get the details, but we feel the fire beneath. In the midst of all of this living, Mohn-Slate is a fierce romantic—wanting what's right and real, even as she sees the traps and tangles of the prices paid. She's going in—and we, lucky readers, get to follow her." —Jan Beatty, author of The Body Wars

"Dear Reader, take heed. Meg Leonard’s book of lullabies is no gently rocking cradle song. What we call the ‘domestic realm’ is here a near-mythical world of stark light and steep shadow, unsettlingly porous and emotionally charged, where beauty and peril, joy and sorrow are, as J.R.R. Tolkien puts it, “sharp as swords.” Sensual, brave, and intimate, these are poems that cut through all the mawkish tropes of home and family life to reveal how we contend, daily, with the oceanic physicality of maternal love and its vast psychic force—profoundly vulnerable, and fierce." —Kimberly Green, author of The Next Hunger

*

About these poets:

Tiffany Melanson is a poet and arts educator with an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of the audio chapbook What Happens (EAT Poems), and her work is has recently appeared in Bridge Eight, Coda Quarterly, and Compose Journal, and is forthcoming in Poetry Magazine. Her poem “Delivery” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. She has been named a Bennington Writing Seminars Teaching Fellow and a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writers Workshop. In addition to her own poetic pursuits, Melanson teaches poetry workshops and oral interpretation at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts where she is also the faculty sponsor of Élan, an international student literary magazine, and co-director of the Douglas Anderson Writers’ Festival.

Jenn Givhan is a Mexican-American poet, novelist, and mama from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. She is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino Del Sol Poetry Series) and the novels Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, POETRY, TriQuarterly, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. Among many honors, Givhan has received New Ohio Review’s Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, the Pinch Journal Poetry Prize, and Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize. Givhan raises her children in New Mexico.

Chloe Yelena Miller is the author of a poetry collection Viable (2021, Lily Poetry Review Books) and a poetry chapbook, Unrest (2013, Finishing Line Press.) She is a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities (2020.) Miller teaches writing at the University of Maryland Global Campus and Politics & Prose Bookstore, as well as privately. She has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from Smith College. Miller lives in Washington, D.C., with her partner and their child. Follow her: http://www.chloeyelenamiller.com or @ChloeYMiller

Emily Mohn-Slate is the author of THE FALLS, winner of the 2019 New American Poetry Prize (New American Press), and FEED, winner of the 2018 Keystone Chapbook Prize (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, New Ohio Review, Muzzle Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches high school English by day and poetry workshops for the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University.

Megan Leonard's poetry explores themes related to motherhood, mermaids, mental illness, marine biology, disability and chronic illness, creepy crawlies, cats, sea gull life stages, and more. Her poems can be found in Mom Egg Review, Transom, The Bellevue Literary Review, Reservoir, and Tupelo Quarterly. Meg's digital chapbook, where the body ends, is available through Platypus Press, and her debut collection, book of lullabies, is available through Milk & Cake Press. She lives and works on the New Hampshire seacoast. www.meganleonardpoetry.com