Poetry Book Club w/ Kelly Grace Thomas!
Wed, Dec 9 · 7:00 PM The Writer's Center · Bethesda
Poet Lore , America’s oldest poetry journal and The Writer’s Center welcomes poet Kelly Grace Thoma s to our monthly Virtual Poetry Book Club for a discussion of her collection, Future Tense. Kelly is joined by Book Club Host, Hannah Grieco. We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online » directly from the publisher, Alice James Books . FREE & open to the public. RSVP below. Kelly Grace Thomas , poet, writer, and coach, is the author of Future Tense (Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She’s the winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her poems appear in: The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry , taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She holds an MFA from Randolph College. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she coaches writers online. www.kellygracethomas.com About Future Tense Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas’s Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman’s fight to become a mother while losing her own. Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent—a countdown. As her mother’s health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going—through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame—finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother’s death. Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood—and how biology can s…


