Letisia Cruz and Sara Ries Dziekonski have teamed up for a poetry double feature! Join us at the bookstore to hear readings from Cruz’s Bigwigs Illustrated Guide to Birds, a gorgous collection written and illustrated from the perspective of her cat AND from Ries Dziekonski’s new award-winning collection Today’s Specials in which she explores inner workings of a family-run resturant.

Letisia Cruz is a Cuban-American writer and artist. She is the author of Bigwig’s Illustrated Guide To Birds (Tolsun Books, 2024), written and illustrated from the perspective of her cat, Bigwig Smallfry. Her collection Migrations & Other Exiles was selected by Dzvinia Orlowsky as the winner of the 2022 Idaho Prize for Poetry and published by Lost Horse Press in 2023. Her first book, The Lost Girls Book of Divination, an illustrated narrative poem loosely inspired by the Tarot’s Major Arcana, was published by Tolsun Books in 2018. She is the recipient of a 2022 artist grant from the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance and was selected as a 2022 Dali Dozen Emerging Artist for her project Rituales: An Exploration of Faith in the Caribbean. Her writing and artwork have appeared in , Ninth Letter, The Acentos Review, Gulf Stream, Saw Palm, Third Coast, Duende, Moko, 300 Days of Sun, and Black Fox Literary Magazine, among others. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and lives in Saint Petersburg with her partner, their three cats, and several dozen plants.

Sara Ries Dziekonski was named Runner-Up in the Press 53 Poetry Award for her manuscript, Today’s Specials, which will be released in September of 2024 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. Sara is a Buffalo native and holds an MFA in poetry from Chatham University. Her first book, Come In, We’re Open, which she wrote about growing up in her parents’ diner, won the 2009 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Competition. Her chapbooks include Snow Angels on the Living Room Floor (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Marrying Maracuyá (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2021), which won the Cathy Smith Bowers Chapbook Competition. Her poems have appeared in U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” and in the journals Slipstream, Potomac Review, SWWIM Every Day, 2River View, Connecticut River Review, and LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, among others. She is the co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing and Submission Services and lives in St Petersburg, FL with her husband, two kids, and cat.