FREE Author Talk with Poet Joshua Robbins, Wednesday, October 16th, 2024
A Free Monthly Online Lecture Series from WritingWorkshops.com & Gemini Ink
Wednesday, October 16th, 2024 via Zoom @ 7PM CST (Add to Cart to RSVP for Free)
Up Next: Joshua Robbins, author of Eschatology in Crayon Wax.
"In Eschatology in Crayon Wax, Robbins achieves a miraculous balance between doubt, hope, and despair. These are poems that desperately want to praise, but never at the price of dishonesty. The beauty that we witness here survives in a suffering world--and is more compelling for it. Easily one of the best books I've read this year."
--Michael Shewmaker, author of Leviathan
Joshua Robbins’s highly anticipated and thought-provoking second book, Eschatology in Crayon Wax, evokes a sense of being torn between a fragile longing for transformation and a whirlwind of flawed divinity. Robbins firmly asserts, “Paradise doesn’t care how you get there. Only that you try,” and is met with divine contempt and a commandment to “shape ashes into ashes” because “besides, I can’t tell you what on earth I’m doing.” In the world of these poems, all one can do is survive the contradictions and cruel mysteries embedded in a contemporary life of empty homes, RFID, mall shooting bullet casings, drone targets, miscarriages, divorce, and suicide. These poems engage deeply with the theodicies of the Book of Job, evangelicalism, class theory, and even the manic crises of Berryman’s “Dream Songs.” At times elegiac, always fearlessly confessional, and even tragicomic, Robbins does not resist hope. With intelligence and style to spare, Robbins displays a fierce concern for this world of things, caught as we are between what is and what should be.
Joshua Robbins was born in Berkeley, California, and grew up in the East Bay. After earning an MFA in Poetry at the University of Oregon and a PhD in English from the University of Tennessee, he joined the English Department at the University of the Incarnate Word, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing. His primary teaching areas are poetry writing, trauma writing, and creative nonfiction. His first book, Praise Nothing, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2013 as part of the prestigious Miller Williams Series in Poetry. Eschatology in Crayon Wax was published in 2024 by Texas Review Press. His recognitions include, the James Wright Poetry Award, the New South Prize, Best New Poets, and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in poetry from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among others. He currently lives in San Antonio.
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Previously (JULY 2024): We featured Ramona Reeves:
The Big Texas Author Talk is a *free* lecture series devoted to showcasing Texas authors from across our big state. Each month we feature one Texas author in conversation with another—from New York Times bestsellers living in Dallas, Houston, and Austin to our rich Texas Latinx border authors living in Laredo and McAllen, not to mention from other deep pockets and corners of our culturally diverse state.
Our lecture series is as entertaining as it is informative—and like Texas itself, we offer a vast array of storytellers who represent the spirit of our extremely distinct Lone Star State and continue to keep us on the literary map.
In the past, we’ve featured novelists such as Kathleen Kent, Marisol Cortez, Joe Lansdale, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho and Texas poet laureates such as Carmen Tafolla, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Jenny Brown, and Emmy Perez.
If you’ve visited with us over the last three years, you know who we are and what we do, and we thank you for your ongoing support. We value your presence and love seeing your faces!
If you’re new to the Big Texas Author Talk and are just discovering who we are and what we do, we welcome you to join us virtually on the third Wednesday of every month at 7 pm CST.
PREVIOUS AUTHORS/TITLES INCLUDE
- Debut Novelist Fowzia Karimi: Above Us the Milky Way
- Edgar-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale: Edge of Dark Water
- Winner of the Iowa Prize for Nonfiction Kendra Allen: When You Learn the Alphabet
- 2020 Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Perez: With The River on Our Face
- New York Times Bestselling Author Kathleen Kent: The Dime & The Burn
- Critically Acclaimed Novelist David Samuel Levinson: Tell Me How This Ends Well
- Award-Winning writer Antonio Ruiz-Camacho's Barefoot Dogs
- San Antonio Poet Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson's She Lives in Music
- Debut Novelist Heather Harper Ellett: Ain't Nobody Nobody
- Amanda Eyre Ward's New York Times bestselling novel The Jetsetters
- Jenny Browne's New and Selected Poems
- Rebekah Manley's Alexandra and the Awful, Awkward, No Fun, Truly Bad Dates
- Cliff Hudder, Pretty Enough for You
- Nan Cuba, Body and Bread
- Sherry Kafka Wagner, Hannah Jackson
- Edward Vidaurre, Pandemia & Other Poems
- Sergio Troncoso's, A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son
- Octavio Quintanilla, If I Go Missing
- Marisol Cortez, Luz at Midnight
- Deb Olin Unferth, Barn 8
- Mike Soto, A Grave is Given Supper
- Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven
- Johnnie Bernhard, Sisters of the Undertow
- Wondra Chang, Sonju
- Alexandra van de Kamp, Ricochet Script
- Laurie Ann Guerrero, I Have Eaten The Rattlesnake
- Carmen Tafolla, The Last Butterfly/La Ultima Mariposa, illustrated by Regina Moya
- Jill Alexander Essbaum, Hausfrau: A Novel.
- Daniel Peña, Bang
- Tomás Q. Morín, Let Me Count the Ways
- Allison Hedge Coke, Look at this Blue
- Vincent Cooper, Zarzamora
- Leticia Urieta, Las Criaturas
- Steve Adams, Remember This
- Andrew Porter, The Disappeared
- Novelist Rubén Degollado's The Family Izquierdo (W.W. Norton, 2022).
- Thomas H. McNeely's story collection, Pictures of the Shark.
- Katie Gutierrez's novel, More Than You'll Ever Know
- Carmen Tafolla's novel, Warrior Girl
- Rudy Ruiz's novel, Valley of Shadows
- Mag Gabbert, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS
- Alex Temblador, Writing an Identity Not Your Own: A Guide for Creative Writers