This series presents readings by a range of emerging, mid-career, and established poets from St. Louis and across the United States. The 100 Boots Poetry Series is co-organized by Jessica Baran, poet and Associate Director of Curatorial and Program Development at Barrett Barrera & Projects Plus Gallery; and Ted Mathys, poet and educator at St. Louis University. Limited-edition broadsides, created by artist Sage Dawson, will be available for free to audience members, and a selection of the poets’ books are for sale courtesy of Left Bank Books. The final event of the season features readings by poets Ange Mlinko and Tommy Pico. We encourage visitors to arrive early due to limited seating.

Ange Mlinko (she/her) is the author of five books of poems, the latest being Distant Mandate (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). Her poems and criticism appear regularly in Poetry, Paris Review, Southern Review, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. Mlinko is the winner of the National Poetry Series and the Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism, and her fourth book, Marvelous Things Overheard, was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award. Mlinko was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2014–15, and she has taught Creative Writing at the University of Florida since 2014. 

Tommy Pico (he/him) is the author of IRL (Birds, LLC, 2016), Nature Poem (Tin House Books, 2017), Junk (Tin House Books, 2018), and Feed (forthcoming in 2019 from Tin House Books). In 2017, Pico was awarded the Friends of Literature prize from the Poetry Foundation and was named a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been profiled in Time Out New York, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. Originally from the Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, Pico now lives in Brooklyn as a contributing editor at Literary Hub, co-curator of the reading series Poets with Attitude, and co-host of the podcast Food 4 Thot.