Join us for virtual and in-person conversations with prominent authors. Hearing an author discuss their work provides unique insights into the books you love and into the literary life in general. We think a lot about our author pairings and event topics, to create synergistic conversations that you won’t hear elsewhere. The last, essential ingredient is you — join the conversation!

Our next event is:

DEAR DAD: LETTERS TO A STRANGER

A conversation and book signing with

Kent Leatham

author of the new poetry collection Modern Man

Sunday, January 24, 2027, 6:00 - 7:30 PM

If you could say anything to a parent you’d never met, where would you start? How about “Dear Dad . . .”?

Kent Leatham’s Modern Man offers an intimate outreach to the author’s anonymous sperm-donor father: a ghost whose absence represents the best and worst of contemporary masculinity. Combining wry humor and raw grief, and with references ranging from Reddit and Rob Zombie to Shakespeare’s sonnets and the Song of Songs, these poems deconstruct toxic gender tropes while lamenting the traumas inflicted on those expected to “take it like a man.”

The BookWorks Bookstore, 667 Lighthouse Ave, Pacific Grove CA

$30 for a ticket and signed copy of the book

Capped at 30 participants.

“Kent Leatham’s Modern Man is a marvel. Here, to be a donor-conceived person is to be born into a life of questions and wonder, impacted by family and memory, known and unknown. What a gorgeous, lyric sincerity in the “Dear Dad” poems. I love this book.” —Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, author of In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Gunpowder Press, 2024)

“Leatham’s epistolary structure is perfect for conveying longing. The book’s second section balances out the personal with the worldly, incorporating texts of all kinds and riffing on the meanings of crush and closet. Only a poet with full command of their craft could deliver poems of such clarity, compassion, and power. Modern Man is the work of an artist of the first order.” —John Skoyles, poetry editor emeritus of Ploughshares, executive director emeritus of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, author of That’s Where You Come In (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2026)

“Kent Leatham’s Modern Man is an unflinching, ambitious, extraordinarily haunting book from a brilliant young poet who dares to explore new psychic terrain for the reader.” —Leonore Wilson, Napa Valley Poet Laureate emerita, author of Tremendum, Augustum (Kelsay Books, 2014)

KENT LEATHAM

Kent Leatham is a poet, a translator of medieval and Northern Renaissance Scots-language verse, a public educator, a proudly pansexual and gender-unregulated member of the LGBTQIA+ family, and the child of an anonymous sperm donor. Kent’s work has appeared over 100 times in more than sixty journals, zines, broadsides, and anthologies around the world, including multiple appearances in Best New Poets. Kent studied poetry at Pacific Lutheran University and Emerson College, served as a poetry editor for Black Lawrence Press for several years, and taught Creative Writing and Social Action courses at California State University Monterey Bay for almost a decade. Kent was born and raised on the ancestral and rightful land of the Rumsen Ohlone people on California’s Central Coast, and currently curates the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium monthly reading series.

in conversation with JENNIFER CARSON

Jennifer Carson is a novelist, essayist, and book critic. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Barnes & Noble Review, Science, Six Hens Journal and Los Angeles Times. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars and was a writer-in-residence at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods and at Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She is also the founder of the literary organization To the Lighthouse. Formerly an astrophysicist, she holds an SB in physics from MIT and a PhD in astrophysics from UCLA. She has just completed her first novel, The Savage Path, and is represented by Stephanie Cabot at Susanna Lea Associates.