Dorian Hairston and Katerina Stoykova discussing and signing new books

Join us for Dorian Hairston and Katerina Stoykova discussing and signing Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson and Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House. Optional RSVP is below, but not required to attend the event.

Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson by Dorian Hairston

Joshua "Josh" Gibson (1911–1947) is a baseball legend―one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow–era segregation and discrimination―all the while breaking records on the ball field.

Dorian Hairston's debut poetry collection explores the Black American experience through the lens of Gibson's life and seventeen-year baseball career, which culminated in his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Hairston brilliantly reconstructs the personas of Gibson and others in his orbit whose encounters with white supremacy interweave with the inevitability of losing loved ones. By alternating between the perspectives of Gibson, members of his family, and contemporary Black baseball players, Hairston captures the complexity and the pain of living under the oppressive weight of grief and racial discrimination.

Emotive, prescient, and absorbing, these powerful poems address social change, culture, family, race, death, and oppression―while honoring and giving voice to Gibson and a voiceless generation of African Americans.

Dorian Hairston is a poet, scholar, and former University of Kentucky baseball player from Lexington, Kentucky. He is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and his work has appeared in Shale, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and pluck!

Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House: Poems by Katerina Stoykova

The fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s ushered in a new tide of European immigrants to the United States. These populations, which hailed primarily from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, were largely adrift in America's cultural melting pot. Laden with their belongings and informed by their experiences, these immigrants became citizens of a new diaspora searching for space to exist in their adopted home.

In Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House, author Katerina Stoykova follows that which "calls / the roaming mind / looking for land" with the shell of her homeland at her back. Through themes of domestic abuse, the death of a parent, the loss of a friend, and the search for cultural identity, the poems in this collection transcend the borders of language and nation-states. As a Bulgarian immigrant, Stoykova weighs the differences between safety and captivity, exploring how one can feel sheltered yet still not feel at home.

Through a series of addresses to her new domestic partner, America, the speaker in this collection expresses gratitude while simultaneously interrogating the landscape that has come to "home" her. With every line of verse, Stoykova's unique grasp on the turns of the English language brings a fresh perspective to immigrant identity and lays bare the terrifying and thrilling duality of living between two cultures.

Katerina Stoykova is an author, editor, teacher, and translator from Bulgaria. She immigrated to the United States in 1995, publishing several poetry books in English and Bulgarian since her arrival. Her book Second Skin was awarded a grant from the European Commission to be translated and published in English. In 2010 she launched an independent literary press, Accents Publishing.