Join us for an afternoon of literary expression through poetry with acclaimed authors Diamond Forde & Jesse DeLong.
📅 Friday, March 20
⏰ 5:30–7:00 PM
📍 Ernest & Hadley Booksellers | Brick House
Each author will be reading from their latest novels, The Book of Alice: Poems by Diamond Forde and The Vinegar in Our Hearts: Triolet by Jesse DeLong.
The Book of Alice is a stunningly inventive and powerful collection that explores lineage and legacy through the life of Forde’s grandmother Alice—a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South—using the King James Bible as a narrative framework.
The poems of The Vinegar in Our Hearts investigate the limitations of believing in notions of romantic love, as positioned by Shakespeare and romantic comedies. Through the use of triolets, a highly lyric French form, the speaker and his lover, Bird, must reconcile the failure of their relationship with their naïve insistence on idealizing romantic versions of each other and on projecting, onto their coupling, iterations of love found in literature.
Two books with very different perspectives that will lend to a great discussion after the reading where guests will have an opportunity to ask questions and meet the authors during a book signing.
All are welcome; registration is encouraged.
