Writers’ Workshop graduate Tramaine Suubi will read from their newest poetry collection, Stages, and will be joined in conversation with poet and Writers’ Workshop graduate Margaret Yapp. Described as an inspiration “by the evolution of our brightest star,” Stages “offers poems alluding to the history of how it came to be and its effects on each human life…Readers will discover poems exploring everything from the gimmicks of capitalism to the false promises of tranquility” (tramainesuubi.com/stages/). Mary Szybist, National Book Award winner for Incarnadine, praises Stages as “[making] a singular life feel vaster than the life cycle of a star,” while poet Steven Leyva, author of The Opposite of Cruelty, says, “In a time when ‘black will always be the new black,’ Tramaine Suubi’s newest book, Stages, crafts new orbits to the oldest questions. As the poems circumnavigate homecomings, desires, and reclamations, the relay baton of sound and syntax passes seamlessly, always ready to hand the reader a line of true substance, a line of unexpected grace, a line of hard-won delight.”

Tramaine Suubi is a quadrilingual multi-hyphenate Bantu writer hailing from Kampala. They are a graduate of Wheaton College, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yellow Arrow Writer-in-Residence, and the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Suubi is the editor of Writivism magazine, and their poems have appeared in Brink Literary Magazine and Solstice Literary Magazine, among other publications.

Margaret Yapp is the author of Green for Luck (EastOver Press, 2024) and the founding editor of Rampage Party Press. She has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MFA in Book Arts from the Center for the Book. She lives in Iowa City.