"In Burn, Barbara Hamby returns to her signature power odes full of humor and wonder. She’s a poet equally at ease with old-timey gods and goddesses, cherry Kool-Aid, and Cracker Jack. Her wit and wisdom are the prizes we dig for in each of her poems as she helps us navigate the terrifying world of environmental devastation and dangerous political nonsense. Who else but Barbara Hamby could respond to propaganda and misinformation with a hefty abecedarian ode to the beauty and truth of the English language? She is fearless and she is peerless. She is poets' own Lady Luck to the rescue, “looking like Glinda/in The Wizard of Oz.”

-Denise Duhamel, author of Pink Lady

Please join us for a special evening of poetry with Barbara Hamby, reading her latest book, Burn.

About the Book

The world is burning with fire and hatred, but at the same time it is filled with love and incredible beauty. The poems in Burn tango with why the world is so beautiful and terrible at the same time. Hamby asserts that everything is a mess—how do we walk through it laughing and crying? Sometimes you look back and think, “How was I so lucky? I could have died a thousand times, but I didn’t. But I will.”

About the Author

Barbara Hamby has published eight books of poems, most recently Burn (2025), Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all with the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her book of linked stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, won the 2010 Iowa/John Simmons Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press. Her novel, At the Mamba Room, will be published by Four Way Books March 2027. She is a Distinguished University Scholar at Florida State University.