Fall for the Book: Poetry Happy Hour

Friday, October 10, 2025 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT

Raise a glass and celebrate George Mason faculty, alumni, and MFA students at this Happy Hour celebration. Jennifer Atkinson is the author of A Gray Realm the Ocean. Eric Pankey’s eighteenth collection Vanishments, traverses a variety of landscapes, from the retreating glaciers to the high deserts of the American Southwest. Poet John Taylor, says of Pankey’s poetry, “Marked by an intriguing dialectic of owning and debt, of fullness and absence, of receptiveness and inability, these intense, thoughtful poems trace an arduous spiritual ‘pilgrimage’ of the highest metaphysical order.” Darby Price’s All the Lands We Inherit a lyric memoir about family, identity, and her mother’s faith. Poet Sally Keith says, “Sharp, tender, insightful, and also very funny… All the Lands We Inherit draws from loss and mourning the bounty of life.” Katie Richards’s Apple Mind explores what happens when communication collapses – focusing on her relationship with her spouse and her autistic son and younger daughter, and the garden that mirrors the family’s struggles. Taylor Franson Thiel’s Bone Valley Hymnal connects science, gender, faith, and myth-making. Regie Cabico says, “These poems escort the reader into a world of devastating yet stunning perseverance where the physical body and lineage become a constitution of fierce hymns during these unprecedented times.” 

Location: Chubby Squirrel Brewing, 10382 Willard Way, Fairfax, VA