Poet Asha Futterman will read from her debut poetry collection, Song of Gray, and will be joined in conversation with poet Margaret Ross. Craig Morgan describes Song of Gray as a “a book of devastating insight and clarity” that features “America’s inexhaustible racism [as] one urgent muse: in sharp, staccato lyrics that leap easily back and forth across the lines of logic.” Margaret Ross also praises Song of Gray as “Attuned to subtle rhymes between ideas and images, theater and candor…[with] searching lyrics cut right through American pieties around empathy and freedom and see ‘the blood / in my mind in the clouds,'” and she adds, “Against a fake world, the poet studies acting knowing it isn’t about pretending, it’s a way to sing a potent song of reality: soulful, funny, and exquisitely unsentimental. What an indelible debut.”

Asha Futterman is an actor and poet from Chicago. She holds an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Her chapbook, empathy, was published by The Song Cave in 2024. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Bennington Review, Conduit, and The Journal. She currently teaches children in Brooklyn.

Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare (Omnidawn, 2015) and of Saturday (The Song Cave, 2024). Her poems and translations have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The Paris Review, POETRY, and The Yale Review, and have been recognized by a Wallace Stegner fellowship, a Fulbright arts grant, a Harper-Schmidt Fellowship, and residencies from Yaddo. She is currently teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.