Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry journal and The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Kelly Grace Thomas to our monthly Virtual Poetry Book Club for a discussion of her collection, Future Tense. Kelly is joined by Book Club Host, Hannah Grieco.
We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online » directly from the publisher, Alice James Books.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Kelly Grace Thomas is a poet, writer, educator, and an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is the author of Future Tense (forthcoming from Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She is the winner of the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. Kelly’s poems have appeared in: The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, 32 Poems, Los Angeles Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Kelly has received fellowships from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop. Kelly is also the co-author of poetry curriculums Voices in Verse: Poetry, Identity, and Ethnic Studies; Stanzas of America: Celebrating BIPOC Poetry; and Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Get Lit), which are currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly is a Blackburn Fellow in the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Benicia, California, where she teaches poetry workshops online. She is currently working on her first novel and memoir. www.kellygracethomas.com
About Future Tense
Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas’s Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman’s fight to become a mother while losing her own.
Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent—a countdown. As her mother’s health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going—through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame—finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother’s death.
Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood—and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life.
About Book Club
This is no run-of-the-mill book club. Visiting writers will read excerpts, join the discussion, and answer your questions about craft, process, the publishing industry, and getting advice for our own writing! We’ll hang and eat snacks with the authors and escape your doomscrolling.
Poetry Book Club will meet on Zoom every second Wednesday of the month with a new poet.
Fiction Book Club will meet every third Sunday of the month in person at The Writer’s Center with a new author.
Come build community and read amazing books that the Big 5 didn’t have the sense to publish!
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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