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Join us for a special LHUCA Literary Series on April 15 featuring writers Jess Smith and Jennifer Loyd! Jess Smith will share excerpts from her debut poetry collection, Lady Smith, while Jennifer Loyd will share excerpts from her upcoming 2025 release, Ghost in the Archive. The evening will kick off with a meet-and-greet at 6:30 p.m., followed by live readings. Drinks and light refreshments will be available! About Jess Smith
Jess Smith is the author of Lady Smith (University of Akron Press, 2025). Originally from Georgia, she is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University, where she also directs the MFA in creative writing. See more at www.jesselizabethsmith.com.
About Lady Smith
These gorgeous, candescent poems confront pain, desire, and love with dark wit and stark, oracular clarity. “Nothing is enough / if you know how much you could have had,” writes Jess Smith in her blazing debut collection Lady Smith, a book about trauma and the absurd bureaucracy of its aftermath. Moments of horror and grief are tempered by bleak humor, as in the poem “Gather,” when she questions “something called a dangerousness hearing, which seems too obvious a title for a legal proceeding” or in the poem “Internalized” when she admonishes the reader, “Don’t act / as if you’ve never heard a ghost / wailing from the cellar / and simply turned the sitcom volume up.” The voice of this unforgettable debut is irreverent, resilient, and revelatory as she navigates the monstrous way the language of desire can echo the language of violence. - Emily Skaja, author of Brute
About Jennifer Loyd
Jennifer Loyd is the author of Ghost in the Archive (2025), selected by Bob Hicok as the winner of Conduit Press’s Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. For her poetry exploring the archives of Rachel Carson, she has received a Stadler Fellowship, as well as research grants from Purdue University, where she earned an MFA. Based out of Colorado, she is a former editor for Copper Nickel, West Branch, and Sycamore Review. Her poetry and prose, which explore the intersection between private voice and public narratives, appear in Best New Poets, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, Swamp Pink, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.
About Ghost in the Archive
Jennifer Loyd’s remarkable Ghost in the Archive opens with an invitation: “Take desire, for example—”. Desire for what? Historical legibility, people lost and disappeared, somatic and spiritual rapture—all of it. These are taut, hungry poems. And they’re formally dazzling—punctuation disappears before your eyes, silences are recorded with magnitude and direction. Ghost in the Archive is a collection about Rachel Carson and history and queerness and nature and death and yearning so hard it buckles. It’s a book about here. It’s a book about you. – Kaveh Akbar
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
511 Avenue K, Lubbock, TX, United States, Texas 79401
