Future Tense launch featuring special guests Julia Kolchinsky and Luisa Muradyrn.

​We’ll spend the first half of the evening celebrating the book with a reading, then go behind the scenes of how Future Tense became a book—from submission to the final manuscript.

​🥂 Private Release Party

​Tuesday, October 13
5:00–6:30 PM PT

​📖 5:00–5:45 PM — The Reading

​Join me, Julia Kolchinsky, and Luisa Muradyrn for a special reading from Future Tense.

​💬 5:45–6:30 PM — Behind the Book: Q&A

​Then we’ll pull back the curtain on how the collection came together.

​I’ll talk about:

• ​How I shaped and reshaped the manuscript

• ​The submission and publication process

• ​Poems that were cut—and why

• ​How the final order of the book came together

• ​Editorial decisions that changed the collection

• ​Surprises, mistakes, and lessons from bringing Future Tense into the world

​This is your chance to ask the questions you’ve always wanted to ask about how a poetry manuscript becomes a published book.

​A Small Ask ❤️

​You’ve already done something huge by preordering Future Tense. Thank you.

​If you love the book and want to help it find more readers, here are a few ways you can spread the word:

• ​Tell a friend who might love Future Tense.

• ​Share the book on social media.

• ​Request it at your local library.

• ​Leave an honest review after you’ve read it.

​Every recommendation helps this book travel farther and find its readers.

​I’m so grateful you’re here. I can’t wait to celebrate with you <3

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with ari b. cofer, Elise Powers, and Jane Wong.

A celebration of authors sharing their recent work, including 'Future Tense,' 'Unfold,' 'Size of Your Joy,' and 'Accidental Devotions.

Third Place Books welcomes authors Kelly Grace Thomas, ari b. cofer, Elise Powers, and Jane Wong to our Ravenna location to present their latest works of poetry and prose.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

Tickets:

This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.

Please note: While RSVP helps us anticipate attendance, your RSVP may not guarantee a seat. Seating is first-come, first-served, and all events at our Ravenna neighborhood store are free and open to the public. Only standing room may be available for events with high interest.

We are happy to accommodate any accessibility concerns. Please contact us at events@thirdplacebooks.com or call our Ravenna store at (206) 525-2347.

About Kelly Grace Thomas's Future Tense . . .

Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman's fight to become a mother while losing her own.

Kelly Grace Thomas is a poet, writer, coach, and ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is the author of Future Tense and Boat Burned. She is also co-author of poetry curricula, including Voices in Verse: Poetry, Identity, and Ethnic Studies; Stanzas of America: Celebrating BIPOC Poetry; and Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry, which are currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She was a Blackburn Fellow at Randolph College, where she earned her MFA. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she is working on her debut novel and coaching writers online.

About Ari B. Cofer's Unfold: Poetry + Prose . . .

From the author of paper girl and the knives that made her comes unfold, a poetic, aching, and hopeful retelling of realizations made while on the journey to healing from both loss of love and loss of self.

ari b. cofer (she/they) is the author of paper girl and the knives that made her, unfold, and inflection point. They have a BA in Professional Writing from Baylor University and an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College. Originally from Texas and Oklahoma, ari currently lives in the PNW with their spouse and their pets.

About Elise Powers's The Size of Your Joy: Poems . . .

An intimate and empowering exploration of the complex and often contradictory experiences of womanhood, offering an unflinching look at how identity, resilience, and self-worth are shaped by the intersections of love, grief, and longing.

Elise Powers received a BA in English Literature from Western Washington University. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including Gather and Only Poems, and has been shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize and awarded second place in the Black Horse Review Poetry Contest. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter, where she writes, collects sea glass, and savors life’s tender joys. Find more of her work on Substack at Two Raw Sugars.

About Jane Wong's Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City . . .

An incandescent, exquisitely written memoir about family, food, girlhood, resistance, and growing up in a Chinese American restaurant on the Jersey shore.

Jane Wong is the author of the poetry collections How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour. An associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University, she grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Joy Sullivan

The Literary Arts Bookstore & Cafe is excited to welcome author Kelly Grace Thomas to celebrate the release of her memoir-in-verse, Future Tense. Thomas will be joined in conversation by local poet Joy Sullivan.

About the book:

Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas’s Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman’s fight to become a mother while losing her own. 

Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent—a countdown. As her mother’s health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going—through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame—finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother’s death.

Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood—and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life.

Kelly Grace Thomas, poet, writer, and coach, is the author of Future Tense (Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She’s the winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her poems appear in: The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write,and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry, taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She holds an MFA from Randolph College. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she coaches writers online. www.kellygracethomas.com

Joy Sullivan is a poet, teacher, and author of the national bestseller, Instructions for Traveling West. She received a Masters in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared in places like Oprah Daily and The Sunday Paper among many others. In addition to leading international writing retreats, Joy has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford University to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Adrian Dallas Frandle and Michael Cohen.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Caitlin Conlon, Carolee Bennett, Jill Crammond.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Angel Nafis, Ashley Pao, Charlotte Cusumano Maiorana, and Shira Erlichman

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.

• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

• A signing will follow the talk.

• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.

• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/cIWYUWYTj10

• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact eventhelp@booksaremagic.net.

Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas’s Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman’s fight to become a mother while losing her own.

Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent—a countdown. As her mother’s health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going—through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame—finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother’s death.

Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood—and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life.

Kelly Grace Thomas, poet, writer, and coach, is the author of Future Tense (Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She’s the winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her poems appear in: The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry, taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She holds an MFA from Randolph College. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she coaches writers online. www.kellygracethomas.com

Born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Angel Nafis is a writer and the author of BlackGirl Mansion (Red Beard Press/ New School Poetics, 2012). She earned her BA at Hunter College and her MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day, BLACK FUTURES, The Rumpus, Poetry Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader and elsewhere. Nafis is a Cave Canem fellow, the recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, a Creative Writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship. She is the founder and curator of the Greenlight Bookstore Poetry Salon. With poet Morgan Parker, she is The Other Black Girl Collective, an internationally touring Black Feminist poetry duo. She teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ashley 敏 Pao is a hybrid writer working at the intersection of poetry, nonfiction, short story, and visual art. She holds an MFA from Randolph College, where she was a Nancy Blackburn Fellow. Her work explores inheritance, nonlinearity, and the strange architectures that hold (and fail) us—often blending fragments, etymology, and dream logic. She is drawn to forms that bend: essays that behave like poems, poems that behave like maps. A collector of words, rocks, and other small obsessions, she writes toward the spaces between things.

Charlotte Cusumano Maiorana is a writer from New York City and the Strategic Publishing Director at Emerald Publishing. Her work has appeared in Thrush Poetry Journal, One Art, TIME, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from Randolph College.

Writer, visual artist, and musician Shira Erlichman is the author of Odes to Lithium (2019) which won the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and is the writer-illustrator of the picture book Be/Hold: A Friendship Book (2019). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Huffington Post, The Nation, and PBS, among others. A finalist for the Lambda award and a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she runs In Surreal Life: an Online Global Creativity School and is a Visiting Professor in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA. Her debut novel Tangerapple is forthcoming from Knopf in June 2027. Her second poetry collection Is is forthcoming from Alice James Books in August 2028. She lives in Brooklyn with her wife.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Hannah Grieco, Courtney LeBlanc, and Jillian Stacia

Join Old Town Books for a special poetry reading and conversation in honor of Kelly Grace Thomas’ Future Tense.

On Wednesday, October 28 at 7PM we are very excited to welcome three local poets, Hannah Grieco, Courtney LeBlanc, and Jillian Stacia, along with Kelly Grace Thomas for a reading and panel event!

Hannah Grieco is the author of "First Kicking, Then Not," out now from Stanchion Books. She writes a literary column for Washington City Paper, edits prose at a variety of small presses and literary journals, and teaches literature at Marymount University. Read her work in The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, Brevity, Wigleaf, Shenandoah, Poet Lore, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her at www.hgrieco.com.

Courtney LeBlanc is the author of the four full-length collections, most recently Her Dark Everything and Her Whole Bright Life (winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize). She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate Emerita and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She’s also the founder of the Poetry Coven, a monthly generative workshop. She loves pitbulls, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. Find her online at www.courtneyleblanc.com.

Jillian Stacia is the author of the poetry collection, SET THE BONE, published by Arcana Poetry Press. She was selected as an Honorable Mention for the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize and short-listed for the 2026 Central Avenue Poetry Prize. She has been nominated for several awards, including 2025 Best of Net and the 2025 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and anthologies. Find her online @jillianstacia to read more of her work.

Kelly Grace Thomas, poet, writer, and coach, is the author of Future Tense (Alice James Books, 2026) and Boat Burned (YesYes Books, 2020). She’s the winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her poems appear in: The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She is the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write, and Perform Classic and Spoken Word Poetry, taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. She holds an MFA from Randolph College. Kelly lives in Benicia, California, where she coaches writers online.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Kim Addonizio and Tracey Knapp.

Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Victoria Lynne McCoy and Brian Sonia-Wallace.

Poet Kelly Grace Thomas, discusses & signs Future Tense, in conversation with poets Victoria Lynne McCoy and Bran Sonia-Wallace

Reckoning with infertility, adoption, and love under pressure, Kelly Grace Thomas's Future Tense is a searing memoir-in-verse about a woman's fight to become a mother while losing her own.

Thomas spends three years trying for a child who never arrives. As she struggles with infertility, her mother is dying of Stage IV uterine cancer, and the desire for a child turns urgent--a countdown. As her mother's health deteriorates, time narrows, pressure builds, and the clock refuses to slow. As her marriage strains and the world remakes itself without her, Thomas refuses to give up. The fertility clinic is the coldest place on earth; still, she keeps going--through years of medical gaslighting, IVF consults, mounting debt, and backhanded blame--finally welcoming her daughter through adoption just months before her mother's death.

Intimate and unflinching, Future Tense interrogates the intertwined joys and griefs of womanhood and motherhood--and how biology can sometimes turn against us. Thomas approaches illness and loss with clarity and care, writing with a generosity that welcomes readers in. Despite their brevity, these poems refuse despair, finding meaning and connection even in the hardest seasons of life.