An afternoon of poetry with Caleb Nichols

Caleb Nichols is the first queer poet laureate of San Luis Obispo County California.

Their poems have appeared in the New England Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry Ireland Review and many other places on both sides of the Atlantic. Caleb is the author of Lithic: A Hyperballad, winner of the 2025 Harbor Editions Laureate Prize and the editor of You & i Are Earth: Poems of the Queer Pastoral, published by 14 Poems (forthcoming in 2027). Caleb holds a PhD from Bangor University in North Wales and teaches at Cal Poly State University.

Advance praise for Lithic: A Hyperballad

"Caleb Nichols’ formally restless and inventive poems are “equal parts sex and salvation,” filled with queer desire and bitter sweet elegy for the planet. Nichols searches for an opening through layers of stone into the mutability of awareness, asking not only how we survive but how we are survived.

"Inspired by and in dialog with the work of many other writers and musicians, Lithic pulls us along into its flow—a cloud-rich and penny-poor “catalog / of wants / a life spent / gathering.” From such a life and despite the world’s violences, the music of these poems rises as a resolute hallelujah.”

— Mira Rosenthal, author of Territorial  (Pitt Poetry Selection) 

"What if sound itself is narrative? The sound of the Welsh language, the sound of the river, the remixed sounds of the musics that haunt and bedrock this book, the sounds that are the matter of our lives and the sounds that are inside of us, our perception. In this collection, we're asked to open ourselves "to listen to the hiss of cochlea coiling/ chambers unspooling releasing their crystalline sphinxes". Caleb Nichols’ gift for orchestral and balsamic phrasing is like no-one else. 

— Colin Herd, author of Aquafaba (A Poetry Society Selection) 

"This book is so fresh, so musical and Björk-level playful you will want to dance and weep at the same time. These poems are physical events, undeniable eruptions. Trees pen essays, men become a “thicket of reciprocal moans,” an image roots itself in the sky, and the most alive thought is that which geysers forth from ambling and wending, from two feet meeting the earth again and again. With sacred repetition, dizzying queer desire, and “ancient grief,” Caleb Nichols shows us how to live in a larger reality, one where a “cloud’s shadow” is in fact “more real than the actual cloud.”

— Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Suffered An Emergency 

Event venue

Henry Miller Memorial Library, 48603 Highway One, Big Sur, United States

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