Observable Readings: Devin Johnston & Justin Danzy
April 19, 2027 @ 7:00 pm
The reading will be held in-person at High Low.
Saint Louis Poetry Center welcomes poets Devin Johnston and Justin Danzy for Observable Readings.
Books available for purchase from Left Bank Books.
ABOUT THE BOOKS
BRIGHT THORN: POEMS 2000-2026
The selected poems of Devin Johnston, a poet who can “change the way you breathe” (Maureen N. McLane). Bright Thorn, distilling Devin Johnston’s work across a quarter century and seven books, offers an alternative to our frenzied moment through the calm measured feeling and formal intelligence of his verse. Historical, philosophical, closely observational, and rooted evenly in the deep poetic past and the daily rhythms of American life, these poems open the world to imaginative scrutiny. Johnston is a chronicler in a Yeatsian sense, whose eye, cast discerningly over the landscape, is affectionate yet icily clear.
RUN IN SUCH A WAY
A poet’s candid and probing exploration of faith, Blackness, and masculinity. With poems that closely examine familial bonds and heritage, biblical teachings, a shifting understanding of home, and the violence of toxic masculinity, Justin Danzy’s Run in Such a Way sits at the crossroads of religion, race, gender, and more. A collection about pursuit, tracking the narrative of its speaker’s journey toward a deeper understanding of himself and of his community as he moves from child to man, the book wrestles with the way an identity is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed again throughout one’s life. Playful and sincere in equal measure, Danzy’s command of the line carries us through as we travel with the speaker to the precipice of belief. Danzy’s lyrical voice and fealty to his people pays homage to the world that made him, and considers all that the speaker of this tremendous debut has—both wisely and foolishly—run toward and away from in the search for truth.
ABOUT THE POETS
DEVIN JOHNSTON spent his childhood in North Carolina. He is the author of eight books of poetry including Bright Thorn: Poems 2000–2026, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2026. He has also published Creaturely and Other Essays, meditations on the natural world. He works as an editor of Flood Editions, a nonprofit publishing house, and he teaches at Saint Louis University in Missouri.
JUSTIN DANZY is a poet and educator from Southfield, Michigan, and the author of Run in such a way (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press), which Rachel Eliza Griffiths described as “a vision of snare, thorn, tongue, and the endless rhythms through which language skims its wings across the darkened faces of history, memory, and body.” He is a Cave Canem Fellow, the 2019 Gregory Padlo Fellow at the Frost Place, winner of New England Review’s Award for Emerging Writers, a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets University Prize. Danzy’s poems can be found in publications such as Pleiades: Literature in Context, Poetry, New England Review, Missouri Review, and Obsidian. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri and teaches English at St. Louis University High School.
VENUE
The Observable Readings series is supported in part by:
