Kelly Grace Thomas in conversation with Kim Addonizio and Tracey Knapp.
Join us on Wednesday, November 11 at 7pm when Kelly Grace Thomas celerates the release of her collection, Future Tense, at 9th Ave!
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Praise for Future Tense
“A beautiful meditation on the slow, aching, and sometimes miraculous state of intertwined grief...”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
"In eclectic structures, whether careful tercets or sprawling fragments, Thomas ricochets between loss and desire until
they blend..."—Shira Erlichman, author of Odes to Lithium
"....Future Tense learns how deeply love is entangled with endurance. The poems widen to hold grief and arrival in the same hands, writing toward care, astonishment, and gratitude, the wisdom of waiting and loss."—Diannely Antigua, author of Good Monster
About Future Tense
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.
About Kelly Grace Thomas
Kelly Grace Thomas, poet, writer, and coach, is the author of Future Tense and Boat Burned. She is the winner of the Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: The Sun, The Adroit Journal, 32 Poems, Los Angeles Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Randolph College and live in Benicia, where she coaches poetry online. www.kellygracethomas.com
About the Readers
Kim Addonizio’s most recent poetry collection is Exit Opera (W.W.Norton). She is the author of eight other poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius, as well as a memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. Addonizio’s work has been honored with fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, and her collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland, CA and teaches poetry workshops on Zoom. Find her online at https://www.kimaddonizio.com .
Tracey Knapp's second collection, Swerve, was released from Pine Row Press in Spring 2026. Her first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received awards and scholarships from La Romita School of Art in Terni, Italy, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Rattle, Five Points, New Ohio Review and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and two Pushcart prizes. Originally from New York’s Hudson Valley, Tracey lives in the Bay Area of California.
Born in Los Ángeles, California, Yaccaira Salvatierra is a poet, translator, and dedicated educator teaching for over 20 years while raising her two sons as a single parent. Her debut collection, Sons of Salt (BOA, 2024) was deemed one of the "Best Books for Adults 2024" by the New York Public Library. She earned her BA at the University of California at Santa Cruz, an MA at San José State University, and an MFA at Randolph College. She received the Dorrit Sibley Award for Poetry and the Puerto del Sol Poetry Prize. She has been awarded the Lucille Clifton Memorial Scholarship as a fellow at the Community of Writers Workshop, and scholarships for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Translator’s Conference, and Macondo. She is an organizer for the San Francisco International Flor y Canto Literary Festival and lives in Oakland, CA, where she teaches literacy and poetry to youth.