Join us as we celebrate the release of Amber McBride’s poetry collection Thick with Trouble. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: From National Book Award finalist Amber McBride comes a mystical, transcendent poetry collection about Black womanhood in the American South.
In Thick with Trouble, award-winning poet Amber McBride interrogates if being “trouble”—difficult, unruly, fearsome, defiant—is ultimately a weakness or an incomparable source of strength. Steeped in the Hoodoo spiritual tradition and organized via reimagined tarot cards, this collection becomes a chorus of unapologetic women who laugh, cry, mesmerize, and bring outsiders to their knees. Summoning the supernatural to examine death, rebirth, and life outside the male gaze, Amber McBride has crafted a haunting, spellbinding, and strikingly original collection of poems that reckon with the force and complexity of Black womanhood.
About the Author: Amber McBride is the author of Me (Moth), a young adult novel that was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and won the 2022 Coretta Scott King–John Steptoe Award for New Talent. Her sophomore novel, We Are All So Good At Smiling, has also received critical acclaim. Her work has been published in Ploughshares and Provincetown Arts, among other publications. She is an avid practitioner of Hoodoo and a professor of English at the University of Virginia.