Join the Georgia Center for the Book for an evening with Poets Jennifer Sadre-Orafai and Valerie A. Smith This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

We are committed to a safe environment. For the safety of our invited speakers, staff, and all attendees, we respectfully request that masks be worn in the venue for the duration of the event. We are currently limiting the capacity of the Auditorium to promote social distancing, so registration is required.

About Dear Outsiders

“You can tell who the locals are,” the children say, “Our eyes are closed.” The eyes of Dear Outsiders are closer to the ground. Each of Sadre-Orafai’s prose poems appears as a souvenir–starfish dried, with a local polish, replacing sea stars that rot when they’re plucked from the shoreline–which is to say that in their bite-sized blocks, they hold the essence of the place within them.

Exploring the grief of siblings raised by the ocean’s constant swell (and the tourist town & traps accompanying that place) as they are displaced into mountain culture, Sadre-Orafai explores, too, her own experience watching the south be swallowed for its surface-beauty, and then left behind. She says, “I wrote [Dear Outsiders] because I wanted to explore what it feels like to be different in the South and what it can also feel like when tourists or outsiders come to your home and walk all over it before leaving. There’s a paradox there that’s really interesting to me." Here is a collection which records the surreal atmosphere of a child’s feelings, exploring place as something escaped into, inherited, left–asking who you were there, and who you are here, when you can return to neither.

"Dear Outsiders allows readers to wade into a world where maps become menus, a father’s face is a cliff, and a mother’s fingernails are circus peanuts. Written like a tender address to those who dwell on the periphery, Jenny Sadre-Orafai offers an accumulation of negations while questioning the unknown: ‘What’s the man’s name who names the storms?’ Using both minor and major sensory details, Sadre-Orafai provides a topographical color theory of objects that can only be perceived with the shrewd eyes of a poet—the blue versus orange beach towels, the two red plastic shovels, a yellow gold chain, a stack of pink roses, pawpaw, pigweed, and the mud that smells like dead eggs. Dear Outsiders is a book that you will pull into your chest like ‘the thread, the net, the warning’ that ‘our home is a snake with pulled teeth.’ Even though, as Sadre-Orafai writes, ‘water isn’t easy to read,’ reading or rather swimming through this book might be what saves you. I was willing to become ‘even more animal’ spending time with these poems. Are you?"

—Alison C. Rollins, author of Library of Small Catastrophes

"Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders is a lamentation, an intimate catalogue, an off-script map that mimes the chaotic regularity of the big, wide sea. In their evocative, ecocritical attention to seaside outsiders, townies, and tourists, these interlocking vignettes prompt readers to relearn the language of landscape, love, and, relatedly, the impermanent cadence of our existence. Here the mysteriousness of nature lives within the details of the human body, in the intricacies of our most intimate relationships across time. While reading, I felt I embarked on a deep, urgent journey with Sadre-Orafai—one that provokes an estrangement from symptoms of our everyday inattention, one that lays achingly bare all that we take for granted on this finite Earth."

—Jessica Q. Stark, author of Savage Pageant and Buffalo Girl

"With crystalline precision, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders immerses us in the dream-logic of childhood. A strange, surreal plunge into underwater domesticity, orphanhood, and grief, Sadre-Orafai’s lyric prose is a tidal force, weaving a syntax that pushes and pulls the reader through the terror of absence and estrangement. Spoken through a plural first-person we, Sadre-Orafai invents a grammar of connected memory and collective loss, the act of remembering itself a fugue state in which the undertow of grief “is the rip that sweeps bodies under and into [our chests].” A singular, haunting collection."

—Vanessa Angélica Villareal, author of Beast Meridian

About Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Jenny Sadre-Orafai is the author of Paper Cotton Leather, Malak, and Dear Outsiders and she is the co-author of Book of Levitations. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, The Collagist, and others. She has taught at the university level for twenty-one years. Currently, she is a Professor of English at Kennesaw State University where she teaches creative writing. She has served as a mentor in the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer mentorship program and is a mentor in the Periplus Collective, a program for writers of color. In 2012, Sadre-Orafai co-founded the literary journal Josephine Quarterly with poet Komal Mathew. She is the former Executive Director of the nonprofit organization Georgia Writers. She explores identity, the natural world, and family in her poetry collections and in her essays.

About Valerie A. Smith

Valerie A. Smith’s first book of poems, Back to Alabama, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2024. She has a PhD from Georgia State University and a MA from Kennesaw State University where she currently teaches English. Her poems appear in Radix, Aunt Chloe, Weber, Spectrum, Obsidian, Crosswinds, Dogwood, Solstice, Oyster River Pages, and Wayne Literary Review, among others. Above all, she values spending quality time with her family.