Visiting Writers - Abby E. Murray in conversation with Ava Winter
Date and Time
- Friday, Aug 8, 2025 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Location
Francie & Finch Bookshop
130 S. 13th St.
Category
Details
Join us on Friday, August 8th as poet Ava Winter talks with Abby E. Murray about their second poetry collection Recovery Commands. Selected out of 300 entries as the 2024 winner of the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize, this book explores the intersection of military and civilian life.
To order a copy of Recovery Commands, call Francie & Finch Bookshop 402-781-0459!
Early Praise for Recovery Commands:
Murray gets your attention, but not in the way you’re thinking, not up in your face, but through every crack in your soul; the incantation heals what needs healing. - Gary Copeland Lilley, author of Raven on Moaners’ Bench
About the Book:
Recovery Commands is a book of poems about the collision of military and civilian life found inside one loving, long-term, and contradictory marriage. Two people, each informed by and embedded within cultures that would seem to be at odds with one another, somehow hold fast to each other through decades of war and its lasting legacies. Recovery Commands is an instruction manual for how to love despite the practical reasons not to.
About the Authors:
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.
Ava Nathaniel Winter is the author of Transgenesis, which was a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poetry has appeared in The Baffler, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Ava holds an MFA From the Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, where she teaches in the Department of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. Learn more at www.avanwinter.com.
