Lit Chat with Local Poet and Author Michelle Lizet Flores

# Magic and the Unflinching Exploration of Self

The Friends of the Bill Brinton Murray Hill Library are sponsoring a special Lit Chat Interview with local poet Michelle Lizet Flores live at the Library this February! Michelle will chat with fellow poet and Lit Chat alum, Jessica Q. Stark, about her latest book of poetry. 

“Michelle Lizet Flores’ Invasive Species contains the expansive magic required to dress the wounds of heartbreak and survival. Part vexed, Floridian pastoral, part ode to diasporic selfhood, this book enthralled me with its vivid voice, its persistent attention to a self always at odds with geography, familial inheritance, and grief’s long tenure. Rooted in hurricanes and heat, Flores invades a southern stillness—she runs the page. And in that surge, this book will upend how you look at the miracle of our temporary bodies, of motherhood and the fleeting moments that compose an undying kind of love.” –Jessica Q. Stark, author of Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020) and Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023).

# JOIN

Lit Chat Interview with Michelle Lizet Flores, Saturday, February 24, at 2 p.m. This event will take place live at the Bill Brinton Murray Hill Library and will be livestreamed online via Zoom. A book signing will follow and books will be available to purchase on-site. 

Register now!

Michelle Lizet Flores is a graduate of the FSU and NYU creative writing programs. She currently works as a Creative Writing Instructor at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and co-hosts the What's in a Verse Poetry Open Mic at Rain Dogs. Publications include The NCTE English Journal, Salt Hill Journal, and The Talon Review. A finalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Award for Poetry, she wrote the chapbooks Cuentos from the Swamp and Memoria, and the picture book, Carlito the Bat Learns to Trick or Treat. Her short fiction is in the anthology, Places We Build in the Universe. Invasive Species, her first full-length collection of poetry, is currently available from Finishing Line Press.

Interviewer Jessica Q. Stark is the author of Buffalo Girl (BOA Editions, 2023), a finalist for the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, Savage Pageant (Birds, LLC, 2020), and four poetry chapbooks, including INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). Her poetry has most recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Pleaides, among other literary journals. She is a Poetry Editor at AGNI and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Florida. She co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series in Jacksonville, Florida.

# READ

Check out Michelle's work from the library!

# THE LIBRARY RECOMMENDS

More poetry to enjoy:

• If They Come For Us, by Fatimah Asghar
• Pity the Beautiful, by Dana Gioia
• Third Winter in Our Second Country, by Andres Rojas