Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by celebrated poets Kevin Goodan and Keetje Kuipers on Tuesday, June 4, at 7:00 pm. Goodan will read from his new poetry collection In the Days That Followed (Alice James Books, May 2024) and Kuipers will read selections of her published work. This event is free and open to the public.

Kevin Goodan was born in Montana and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation where his stepfather and brothers are tribal members. Goodan earned his BA from the University of Montana and worked as a firefighter for ten years with the U.S. Forest Service before receiving his MFA from University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004. He has taught at the University of Connecticut and has served as Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University. He currently lives in the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of three books of poems, all from BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, The Keys to the Jail (2014), which was a book club selection for The Rumpus, and All Its Charms (2019), which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and includes poems honored by publication in both The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje’s poetry and prose have appeared in Narrative, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, Orion, The Believer, and over a hundred other magazines. Her poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and read on NPR. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Keetje is Editor of Poetry Northwest and a board member at the National Book Critics Circle.

About In the Days That Followed:
Following the news of a long-past lover’s death, In the Days That Followed grapples with the sudden knowledge of the existence of a stillborn child conceived out of wedlock and never named, and never spoken of after the relationship had ended.

How do you miss someone who you never even knew? It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into the landscape, and give them a fleeting figure. By giving them a voice and a shadow, a gesture of acknowledgement, we can give a sweet farewell from the earth, from our past, and from their future they were never granted.

Kevin Goodan

Keetje Kuipers