The University of Georgia MFA Narrative Nonfiction Program and Avid Bookshop present a book reading and signing event by former Mississippi Poet Laureate Beth Ann Fennelly, who will read from her work Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs.

Published in 2018, Heating & Cooling is a celebratory book that combines the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys.

Fennelly was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2016 to 2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables, all with W. W. Norton. In addition to Heating & Cooling, she has written two other books of prose: Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, a collection of essays, and The Tilted World, a novel co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin. A contributing editor to the Oxford American, she also writes freelance on travel, culture, and design for many magazines.

Event space is limited to 75 persons.