Joy Is My Middle Name: Sasha Debevec-Mckenney Reading With Lauren K. Watel & Natalie Villacorta

From the venue:

Charis welcomes Sasha Debevec-McKenney reading alongside Lauren K. Watel & Natalie Villacorta in celebration of Joy Is My Middle Name, a hilarious, moving, and accessible poetry collection that interrogates patriotism in a deeply flawed country.

In her best imitation of a historian, poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney combs through the past. Joy Is My Middle Name is about crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasily through cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism, and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with ease

This remarkable debut collection showcases Debevec-McKenney’s intimate, assured, conversational voice. Full of stories, character, awkward silences, and actual jokes, Joy Is My Middle Name seamlessly traces the author’s search for herself and examines how she gets in her own way, brings humor and lightness to rock-bottom moments, and considers the shamelessly girly as a serious cultural artifact