Bobby Elliott and Valencia Robin Poetry Reading

Join us for a reading with poets Bobby Elliott and Valencia Robin. Bobby Elliott will be reading from his debut poetry collection, The Same Man, and Valencia Robin will be reading from her new poetry collection, Lost Cities. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.

Bobby Elliott's debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Raised in New York City, he earned his BA from Sarah Lawrence College and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow and won the Kahn Prize for his work with undergraduate writers. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from BOMB, The Cortland Review, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, RHINO, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and sons.

Valencia Robin is the author of Lost Cities (forthcoming August 2025) and Ridiculous Light, which won Persea Books' first book prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named one of Library Journal 's best poetry books of 2019. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, she has published poems in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Unbound, and VQR, which awarded her the Emily Clark Balch Prize. Robin has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia and currently teaches at East Tennessee State University.