The Writer’s Center welcomes writer Melanie McCabe for a reading of her latest collection of poems, All The Signs Were There. Melanie is in conversation with poet Jennifer Keith. FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.

Melanie McCabe is a writer of poems, essays, memoir, and most recently, fiction. She is a lifelong Virginian and was a high school English and creative writing teacher in Arlington for twenty-two years. Her debut novel, Road Longer Than Memory, will be published by Oceanview Publishing on June 2, 2026. Her forthcoming book of poems, All The Signs Were There, won the Longleaf Poetry Prize and will be out in the winter of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and was published in the fall of 2017. Previous books of poems include: The Night Divers (Terrapin Books), What The Neighbors Know (FutureCycle Press) and History of the Body (David Robert Books.) Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Reader’s Digest, Shenandoah, Cumberland River Review, Sweet, Forge Literary Magazine and elsewhere.

Jennifer Keith’s poems have appeared in The Nebraska Review, Sewanee Theological Review, The Free State Review, Unsplendid, Smartish Pace, Best American Poetry 2015 and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist for the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace and her first full-length poetry book, Terminarch, was selected by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award.

About All The Signs Were There

“To date, there has been no bomb,” writes Melanie McCabe in her gorgeously foreboding collection of poems, All the Signs Were There. Here are overgrown vacant lots, ants running in the walls, shadowy relationships, a “coastline of sharp and slice.” This is a powerful book of omens—and of the courage to live through them. —David Ebenbach, author of What’s Left to Us by Evening

“Feral is the name given to what’s wild/ by what isn’t,” writes Melanie McCabe in this shimmering sequence that maps the heart’s bewitching cartography. Traveling through the lush landscapes of childhood and adolescence where fields reveal “the sudden stonehenge of a lone/gate,” to the stormy world of adulthood where “[m]orning, still beating, is swallowed/mouse-whole down a snake,” McCabe pays tribute to time’s uncanny passage. Here, lovers clasp hands and plunge like “banished angels” from an “edge” they carved themselves, while teenaged rivals reunite late in life, carving out friendship, forgiveness, and healing. All the Signs Were There is filled with breathtaking insight and painterly vision.—Jane Satterfield, author of The Badass Brontës

On behalf of all of us at Longleaf– and previous Longleaf Press Book Prize winners–who helped read and comment on hundreds of manuscripts, I want to celebrate All the Signs Were There, the intelligence and range of Melanie McCabe’s atmospheric poems and her unique and otherworldly ear for the language. We were riveted: “/the air that finds my lungs is chosen for its jade/ stillness. Each breath for its lull.”  —Roger Weingarten, Publisher, Longleaf Press

About Terminarch

Terminarch, winner of the 2023 Able Muse Book Award, is Jennifer Keith’s debut full-length poetry collection. The title, a neologism that evokes both terminus and matriarch, signals a collection that confronts endings and what survives—personal, cultural, and ecological. Keith’s poems move from intimate meditations on memory, grief, and family loss to broader reflections on extinction (including the passenger pigeon’s “endling”), technology, and the traces we leave behind. Working in free verse and traditional forms with dark wit and lyric intensity, Terminarch maps the terrain between loss and resilience, finding in language itself a means of preservation and renewal.

If you need an accommodation for this event, please contact us at access@writer.org. We will attempt to fulfill all requests, but advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility services.

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