© Ramsey Mathews

Recipient of the 2024 Louisiana Writer Award, David Kirby teaches at Florida State University, where he is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. His many books include Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll, described by the Times Literary Supplement as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” In 2016, Kirby received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Florida Humanities, which called him “a literary treasure of our state.”

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The Winter Dance Party: Poems, 1983-2023

The Winter Dance Party lays out, not someone’s entire life, but that person’s life as a poet. This enthralling, career-spanning book by the National Book Award finalist David Kirby is made up mainly of new poems along with a generous number of older ones alternating with one another in nine sections that proceed, not chronologically, but more like chapters in a surreal memoir, with long poems followed by short poems, exploratory formats next to more traditional ones, straightforward poems cheek by jowl with ones that are more allusive.