Decatur Book Festival 2026 - As Time Goes By (Day 2)

From the venue:

In debut collection do not destroy this, Taylor Clement celebrates the joy and grit of living in the deep south during compound disasters brought on by climate change. In The Book of Alice, Diamond Forde retells the story of her grandmother’s life through the framework of the only poetry Alice knew: the King James Bible. In Be Easy: New & Selected Poems, Adrian Matejka explores the twitchy unease of unintentional migration and economic instability as the country faces a future every bit as unsettling and circuslike as the parking lot carnivals in the Midwest. In Lift Every Voice, Phillip B. Williams explores the capacity for the past to be both a source of dread and empowerment, an unshakable reminder of violence and an indelible testament to the endurance of love.

Purchase your book from Charis Books & More. When you check-out from that link, please mention that you will need to pick your book up at the event. Books will also be for sale on-site by Charis, and a portion of your purchase will benefit the Decatur Book Festival.

The Decatur Library Auditorium is on the Ground Floor (G in the elevator) of the building.

This event is free and open to the public. No tickets are required, and seating is first come, first served.

Signing information:
Signing time: 11:15 AM

Signing location: Decatur Library Meeting Room

About the Authors

Taylor Clement, a native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, is a writer, poet, and researcher. She earned her PhD at Florida State University where she studied Renaissance poetry and visual culture. Her work has been featured in Renaissance Studies and Word & Image. She teaches professional writing and editing courses at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her new collection is do not destroy this.

Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, was chosen by Patricia Smith as the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of the Pink Poetry Prize, the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and CLA’s Margaret Walker Memorial Prize, and other honors. She is a Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow whose work has appeared in Boston Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and she serves as the interviews editor for Honey Literary. Diamond holds an MFA from The University of Alabama and a PhD in creative writing with concentrations in African American poetics and fat studies from Florida State University. She is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. Her new poetry collection is The Book of Alice.

Adrian Matejka is the author of six poetry collections and the graphic novel Last on His Feet. He has been nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, served as the poet laureate of the state of Indiana from 2018 to 2019, and is editor-in-chief of Poetry magazine. He lives in Chicago. His new collection is Be Easy: New and Selected Poems.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the novel Ours and two collections of poetry: Thief in the Interior, which was the winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and Mutiny, which was a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the winner of a 2022 American Book Award. Williams is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. Raised in Chicago, he currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New York University and is founding faculty of the Randolph College low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. His new poetry collection is Lift Every Voice.