Looking forward to celebrating two of University of Pittsburgh Press’s/Pitt Poetry Series’s 2020 prize winners — about:blank by Tracy Fuad, winner of the Donald Hall Prize, and Little Pharma by Laura Kolbe, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize! Tracy and Laura will read their work and will engage in a conversation that includes reading one another's work; we'll also have time for an audience Q&A. Join us!

You can order about:blank and Little Pharma on our website! Check out our site here to view all of our upcoming events and local partnerships, purchase books directly from our inventory, and place orders for books we don't currently have in stock.

This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 10/29. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

Praise for these books:

Winner of the 2020 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Claudia Rankine

In about:blank, Tracy Fuad builds a poetics of contemporary dissociation. Funny, plaintive, and cutting, this formally inventive debut probes alienation in place and in language through the author’s consideration of her own relationship to Iraqi Kurdistan. about:blank—the title of which is the universal URL for a blank web page—complicates questions of longing and belonging. Interrogating the language of internet chatrooms, Yelp reviews, and the Kurdish dictionary, the poems here leap surprisingly between subjects to find new meaning.

Written before and during the years the author spent living in Iraqi Kurdistan, the collection documents the alienation of being inside, outside, and between language(s) and the always-already terror of grammar. At once haunted and humorous, about:blank inhabits and exhibits the disorientation and fragmentation that is endemic to the internet era, and mourns the loss of a more embodied existence.

Winner of the 2020 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize in Poetry

The title Little Pharma is both a doppelgänger and a cri de coeur: as the poet’s dreamlike double, the character Little Pharma navigates the murky channels of the hospital and clinic, the borderlands of the living and the dead, and the journey from novice to healer. At the same time, the poems plead for a return to a littler pharma, a space for stolen intimacy and momentary quiet amid the impersonal and engulfing chill that floods the anatomical theater and the corridors of illness. Little Pharma is a Dantean journey from the depths of an institution, and of a pervading personal dread, to a renewed celebration of human contact, the body, and the giddy, terrifying excitement of ongoing life.

About the writers:

Tracy Fuad is the author of PITH, winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Prize, and DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD DAD. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Best New Poets Anthology, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and a 2021–2022 Writing Fellow at the Providence Fine Arts Work Center.

Laura Kolbe is a doctor and medical ethicist at New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. She studied English and American literature at Harvard and the University of Cambridge. Her work has been anthologized in A World Out of Reach. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Andrew and their dog Bonnie.