Visiting Authors – Poetry Reading with Carolina Hotchandani and Maria Zoccola
February 22 @ 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Join us on Saturday, February 22nd at 4:30 as we welcome poets
Carolina Hotchandani and Maria Zoccola!
Maria will be reading from her debut poetry collection Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems, and Carolina will be pulling from her award-winning anthology of poetry from the last few years. We can’t wait to see you there!
To order a copy of Carolina’s latest publication The Book Eaters, follow the link HERE.
To order a copy of Maria’s debut poetry collection Helen of Troy, 1993: Poems, follow the link HERE.
Copies will be available for purchase at the event.
About the Authors:
Carolina Hotchandani is the author of The Book Eaters, the 2023 Perugia Press Prize winner and one of ten debut poetry books featured in Poets & Writers Magazine’s 2024 debut poets issue. She was awarded a 2024 Nebraska Arts Council Individual Fellowship, a 2024 Nebraska Book Award, and her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. She is a Goodrich Assistant Professor of English in Omaha, Nebraska.
Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University, and has spent many years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Maria’s work has previously appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 (Scribner, 2025) is her debut poetry collection.
Advance Praise for Helen of Troy, 1993:
“There is a gracious plenty of grittiness and threat in Maria Zoccola’s poems, but the poetry’s verbal vitality, coupled with the novelistic satisfaction of the narrator’s epic-worthy story, achieves the heightened pain and pleasure of the sublime. I cannot foresee a better book of American poetry published this year.” —Ron Rash, award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Serena and Poems: New and Selected
“Sinking into Helen of Troy, 1993 felt like the magic of finding a kindred spirit on the stool next to me in a dive bar. Zoccola’s poems kept me saying, ‘Yes, yes exactly.’ In her rendering of the rural South, she takes things I have felt only indistinctly and delivers them to me with sharp and beautiful and brutal clarity.” —Stacey Swann, author of Olympus, Texas, a GMA Book Club Pick