Join us in for an evening of poetry and cocktails in celebration of National Poetry Month. Our featured poets will be Rachel Jamison Webster and Virginia Bell. There will be time for a Q&A with the audience, and books will be available for sale and signing by the authors. This is a free event, but we ask you to RSVP as space is limited
(Please note this is the last Friday in April)
Rachel Jamison Webster is a professor of creative writing at Northwestern University and the author of four books of poetry in addition to the nonfiction book, Benjamin Banneker and Us, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2023 by The New Yorker and picked as a Notable Book by The New York Times, Booklist and other outlets. Rachel’s essays, poems, and stories have been published in outlets including Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review. She lives in Evanston with her husband, the poet John McCarthy, and their daughter Adele.
Author of the poetry collection Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around (Glass Lyre Press 2025) and From the Belly (Sibling Rivalry Press 2012), Virginia Bell won NELLE Magazine’s Nonfiction Prize in 2020 for the personal essay, “Chicken,” and her poetry won Honorable Mention in the 2019 RiverSedge Poetry Prize, judged by José Antonio Rodríguez. Her work has appeared in New City Magazine, Five Points, Denver Quarterly, SWWIM, EAP: The Magazine, Hypertext, The Night Heron Barks, Kettle Blue Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Rogue Agent, Gargoyle, Cider Press Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Poet Lore, The Nervous Breakdown, The Keats Letters Project, Blue Fifth Review, Voltage Poetry, and other journals and anthologies. Bell is Co-Editor of RHINO Poetry and teaches at Loyola University Chicago and DePaul University.
