Marlin M. Jenkins, J. Bailey Hutchinson

media release: A Room of One's Own presents an evening of poetry with Marlin M. Jenkins and J. Bailey Hutchinson.

J. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.

Capable Monsters moves through entries of the pokémon encyclopedia—the Pokédex—as a way to navigate concerns of identity: otherness, what it means to be considered a monster, how we fit into a larger societal ecosystem. To make space for the validity of oft-dismissed subject material, Marlin M. Jenkins asserts the symbolic, thematic, and narrative richness of worlds like the world of Pokémon: his poems use pokémon as a way to explore cataloguing, childhood, race, queerness, violence, and the messiness of being a human in a world of humans.

 J. Bailey Hutchinson is a poet, editor, and educator. She is the author of Gut, selected by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2022 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and has work featured in Salamander, Beloit, Muzzle, BOAAT, and more. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, she now lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is an associate editor for Milkweed Editions.

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. The author of the poetry chapbook Capable Monsters (Bull City Press, 2020) and a graduate of University of Michigan's MFA program, his work has found homes with Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Waxwing, and Kenyon Review Online, among others. He currently lives and teaches in Minnesota.