Writers' Workshop graduate Sara Gilmore will read from her newest poetry collection, The Green Lives, and poet Alicia Wright will read from her newest poetry collection, You're Called by the Same Sound.

NYU Press describes The Green Lives as "[finding] joy in paradoxes from which felt sense can expand." Poet m.s. RedCherries praises The Green Lives as "an intuitive, nearly prescient, voice [that] reads as if it were a whisper or hymn," while Margaret Ross says: "These poems churn with Heraclitean fire. Time flows back and forth through Gilmore’s vital syntax to reveal 'no order as a serious way.' Sharing warnings and verdant knowledge, guided by a clear-eyed heart, souls navigate the fluctuating rooms and roads and waters of this flickering world under 'sky’s red pixels.' The Green Lives is both moving record and exhilarating prophecy."

Third Hand Books describes Alicia Wright's You're Called by the Same Sound as "a reckoning, a confrontation, and a visionary meditation that interleaves private grief with public lament...In this book, Alicia Wright dredges a family archive in response to histories of devastation in northwest Georgia and the American South. Her flinty lyrics inventory and seek to resist a legacy of despoliation, warning that history is a “murky churn” in which our collective reflection is crystal clear." Mary Szybist praises You're Called by the Same Sound as having "a palpable gravity," while Shane McCrae says: "In You’re Called by the Same Sound, Alicia Wright thinks her way through the fact of the multiplicity of beauty — not primarily at its places of origin, as, say, a contemplation of the many beauties of the natural world, but at its places of perception. In what ways is it meaningful, these poems ask, that beauty is perceived differently by different people? How can a sense of beauty be foundational to ways of being human and thus at the root of thinking about morality? As Wright notes, “You generate your flower-thought and recollect your flood.” How ought the flower-thought and flood of the individual be important to everyone? Wright makes poems that are somehow both weighty and light and ask questions that are fundamental to both poetry and life. You’re Called by the Same Sound is, itself, a beautiful book."

Sara Gilmore’s poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ugly Duckling Presse’s Second Factory and 6x6, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been supported by an Iowa Arts Fellowship and Visiting Writer Fellowship at the University of Iowa. She lived for seventeen years in Seville, Spain, and now lives in Iowa City with her young son. She has worked extensively on translating the work of Antonio Gamoneda.

Alicia Wright is originally from Rome, Georgia, and has received fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Denver, where she is a PhD candidate in English and Literary Arts. She is the editor of Annulet and publisher of Annulet Editions, and lives in Iowa City, where she works as Managing Editor of The Iowa Review.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}