Poetry at the Bookstore!

Tombolo Books welcomes three incredible poets to the bookstore for a reading and discussion of their latest collections! This trio includes Erin L. McCoy, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Taylor Strickland. McCoy will be reading from her debut collection Wrecks which explores her experiance with dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers. My Perfect Cognate staggers between English and Spanish, as language becomes Scenters-Zapico’s mirror, reflecting her body, her family, and the borders that confine them. And in his debut collection Dwell Time, Strickland gives us poems that advocate for a world against isolation, one in which we go beyond our own witness to embrace another’s, and shrink the distance between us. Erin L. McCoy’s debut novel, Underlake, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2026. Her poetry collection, Wrecks, was published by Noemi Press in October 2025 and was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. Erin’s poetry and fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Pleiades, Conjunctions, and other publications, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize. Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from El Paso, Texas. Her latest book, My Perfect Cognate, is forthcoming (Copper Canyon Press, September 2025). She is also the author of two previous collections, Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Colorado State University 2015). Winner of Yale University’s Windham Campbell Prize (2021), she has held a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2017), and a CantoMundo Fellowship (2015). She lives in Tampa and teaches poetry at the University of South Florida. Taylor Strickland is from Tallahassee, Florida. His latest book is Dwell Time (Tapsalteerie, November 2025). His last collection Dastram/Delirium (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) won the Saltire Society Award for Scottish Poetry Book of the Year and was a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. His poems have been The Scotsman Poem of the Week, shortlisted for several prizes, and translated into Irish and Italian. ‘The Low Road’ was adapted by American composer, Andrew Kohn, and performed in Orkney. 'Nine Whales, Tiree', was adapted to film-poem by filmmaker Olivia Booker and composer Fee Blumenthaler, and later selected for Bloomsday and Glasgow Cathedral festivals, among others. He lives in Dunkeld, Scotland.