Program Type:
Authors & Books- Registration is required for this event.
- Registration will close on April 2, 2026 @ 6:30pm.
Program Description
Event Details
Join us for an evening of poetry and conversation as we welcome Taylor Byas to celebrate her second poetry collection, Resting Bitch Face. Byas will be joined in conversation by acclaimed poet and writer Ananda Lima.
Books will be available for sale, courtesy of our neighborhood bookstore, The Book Loft.
About Taylor Byas
Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D., is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face, was a September 2025 pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins.
About Ananda
Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer, author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press), as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers, and will be a Fall 2024 Flagler College Storytellers—Author in Residence. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program and currently serves as a Program Curator at Story Studio and as a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.