​On Sunday, October 11th from 1 - 4 pm ET, I will be facilitating a generative writing workshop as part of the 2020 Letters Festival:

Overheard: The Poetry of Conversation, Headlines, Garbage
Poets have long used the material of everyday life—from snippets of overheard conversations to newspaper headlines, graffiti, garbage, and lists—to create lively snapshots of the "present" in their poems. In this generative workshop, we will read a range of examples, focusing on the moves the poems make, and then write some poems of our own. In addition to the drafts produced in class, participants should leave with numerous ideas for additional writing experiments to try on their own.

The cost is $15 to participate. Registration is open here. 

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I'll also be part of the closing night reading on Sunday, October 18th, reading alongside of Clinnesha D. Sibley, tanner menard, and Susan Steinberg. You can find details about the other workshops and events at the lostintheletters website. 

My new book Some of the Times is now available for preorder at the discounted price of $10 from Barrelhouse. $3 from each book will be divided between two organizations, the First Ward Community Center in Saginaw, Michigan, and the Youth Art & Self-Empowerment Project in Philly. I cannot thank Barrelhouse enough for their generosity in agreeing to donate to these causes.

I'm also incredibly grateful to Craig Santos Perez, Cynthia Arrieu-King, and Brian Teare, for their generous words about the book. These are three poets whose work I deeply love and respect. It means the world to me that they took the time to read Some of the Times. Here is what they had to say:
 
Gina Myers is a deeply authentic poet who intimately captures her struggles with rent, debt, work, illness, politics, and violence in the capitalist ruins of America. Throughout, she bravely confronts some of the times that she almost died and lovingly holds onto some of the times that she fully felt joy. This book is necessary reading for our precarious times. - Craig Santos Perez

In Gina Myers' Some of the Times, Myers addresses herself, her heart, the night, and her anti-capitalist comrades with a downbeat struggle, a night wakefulness tempered always by reality. Here, the city's sirens and burnt out ruins run the same temperature as an off-handed pass me the cigarettes. Their multiple modes--photojournalistic documentary about Saginaw, litany of brushes with death--all portray the decline of American life with profound melancholia always leaning towards the jocular. With echoes of Niedecker, Myles, and Schuyler, these poems lower your guard, then break your heart; You'll want to leave them where someone else can find them--a bench, or on a bus. - Cynthia Arrieu-King
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A daughter of deindustrialized Saginaw, Gina Myers is sensitively attuned to forms of capitalist ruin: the city long after the factory closes, the wage earner barely getting by in a shit job. Whether surveying the blight and arson of her hometown or settling into a gentrifying Philadelphia, Myers tallies the manifold promises capitalism offers and never keeps: “There is an anger I carry/inside that I will never/let go of. Something basic/to hold onto while everything/else disappears.” A daybook of alienated labor and catcalls, chronic illness and summer heat, bad Philly landlords and losing sports teams, Some of the Times is also a daybook of pleasures leveraged against exploitation and misogyny, songs a worker sings to survive her work, songs a lover sings to guard her heart. - Brian Teare

You can preorder the book here. The official release date is October 15, 2020. 

Today Barrelhouse Books shared the cover art for my forthcoming collection of poetry Some of the Times. The cover is designed by Shanna Compton and features photos of Saginaw, Michigan, by Jaime Torres, and I couldn't be happier with it!  

The book officially drops on October 15th, and preorder information will be out mid-next week.