Book Launch! Christian J. Collier, "Greater Ghost" in conversation with Joy Priest

We are honored to host Black southern poet Christian J. Collier in-store to celebrate the publication of his debut collection of poetry, Greater Ghost. He will be joined by local poet and Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Joy Priest. “Wholly. / The way a famished fire washes over a building’s flesh & marrow,” Christian J. Collier writes of the consuming revelations of death and love. In his debut poetry collection Greater Ghost, this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member and the specter of police brutality. The poetic brilliance of this work manifests not only in its lyrical gestures and soft musicality but in its persistent double consciousness, the terror of mortality encapsulated and amplified by praise for the living. With profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir — a poem like “Beloved,” whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but also invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy. Despite all this, Collier never settles into platitudes or pat oversimplifications. The dual meaning of every line honors the complexity of experience and vast terrains of contradictory emotions. JOY PRIEST is the author of Horsepower (2020), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (2023). A recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, her poems and criticism have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books and Sewanee Review, among others. Joy is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. CHRISTIAN J. COLLIER is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His works have appeared in December, North American Review Hayden's Ferry Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.