Greg Rappleye in Conversation with Emily Pease: Reading and Signing

On June 25th at 6-7 PM poet Greg Rappleye will be joined by Hub City Press author Emily Pease for a discussion of Greg's latest poetry collection, Barley Child. 

RSVP on Eventbrite and get a 10% discount on the book when you present it at the bookshop register!

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About the Book

Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.

Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.

About the Author

Greg Rappleye is an Irish-American poet who teaches in the English Department of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He is a former Bread Loaf Fellow and has published five full-length collections of poetry and several chapbooks. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Arts & Letters Prize, and the 2021 Fish Prize in Poetry (Ireland) selected by Billy Collins, former poet laureate of the United States. He has been published widely in the United States and in Ireland, and his work has also been presented on RTE Radio 1, Irish Public Radio. Barley Child, his fifth collection of poetry, won the Miller Williams Prize in Poetry selected by the distinguished poet and editor Patricia Smith, and was published in 2025 by the University of Arkansas Press.

About the Conversation Partner

Emily W. Pease’s collection of short stories, Let Me Out Here, won the 2018 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize at Hub City Press, judged by Lee K. Abbott. Her stories appear in The Missouri Review (Editor’s Prize in Fiction, 1999), The Georgia Review, Shenandoah (Bevel Summers Prize in Short Fiction, 2014), Crazyhorse (Crazyshorts Prize, 2015), Witness, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative online (Top Five Stories of the Week, 2017-2018), and the Kenyon Review online. In 2015, she was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewannee Writers Conference. Before finishing her story collection, she worked for ten years on a novel about Abraham Lincoln’s last three weeks, a project she ultimately abandoned. That effort has found its way into poetry, including the poem, “Apologies to My Failed Book About the Most Famous Man” (yet unpublished). Her poetry appears in One, The Florida Review, Litmosphere, Juniper, and Rattle (Ekphrastic Challenge winner, June, 2021). A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Virginia Tech (MA, English), and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Pease taught writing and creative writing at William & Mary for over twenty-five years. She lives in Williamsburg, VA with dogs, parakeets, chickens, and her husband, Ed. Snakes in the coop continue to provide a subject for poems.