Visiting Author - Stacey Waite - A Real Man Would Have a Gun: Poems

Date and Time

• Tuesday, Mar 11, 2025  6pm - 7pm

Location

Category

Arts

Details

Join us on Tuesday, March 11th at 6:00 as author Stacey Waite presents her new work of poetry A Real Man Would Have a Gun.

About the Book:
Stacey Waite’s newest collection of poems interrogates gender, sexuality, and parenthood. From a genderqueer perspective, the poems set their unflinching gaze on the habits and impacts of masculinity. Poignant, angry, heartfelt, and at times funny, this collection asks us, again and again: What kind of world do we make with gender?

About the Author:
Stacey Waite is Associate Professor of English and Graduate Chair at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln and is the author of five collections of poetry: Choke (winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry), Love Poem to Androgyny, the lake has no saint (Winner of the Snowbound Prize for Poetry), Butch Geography (2013), and just released A Real Man Would Have A Gun (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). Waite is also the author of Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Working in both creative writing and composition studies, Waite is also co-editor of Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies and the textbook, Ways of Reading. Waite’s poetry and essays have appeared in such journals as Writing on the Edge, Assay, New Territory, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Black Warrior Review. Waite’s poems have been anthologized in a range of collections including Best American Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Visit Waite’s website at www.staceywaite.com. 

Praise for the Book:
“A Real Man Would Have a Gun believes in poetry’s ability to salve and save. In it, Stacey Waite walks a tight rope of language in these well-wrought poems that celebrate and question gender as much as they serve to cherish family. And these poems know no bounds. They chat and scream and whisper—and they even dance if you count the Cupid Shuffle. This is a brilliant beauty of a book.”—Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Tradition

“This book isn’t only bold, it’s tender and broken and more complex than the tired trope of ‘queer triumph.’ This book is about family and memory and fuckups through the eyes of a poet who understands that sometimes you can’t extinguish rage; it just ‘turn(s) into / a fire of a different kind.’ We all can see ourselves in this book’s magnificent glow.”—Aaron Smith, author of Stop Lying: Poems

“I will never get over the poems of Stacey Waite—and I don’t want to. A Real Man Would Have a Gun is both slow burn and bright flame, lyric compression and narrative expansion, a book that breaks childhood and parenthood, gender and sexuality—embodiment itself—freshly and sharply open.”—Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted