Tracy will read from The Way The Salt Falls and her three chapbooks. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. Copies of her books will be available for purchase at a discount. The title poem of The Way The Salt Falls is about canning tomatoes with my mother, but the word “fall” has other meanings outside of salt and spoons. The book is about failing and trying to do better on a personal and political level. The poems are written both from my perspective and from those of other people: a visual artist, a refugee, an elderly man, Jacob from the book of Genesis, a cancer survivor, a bureaucrat. I like to say that the “story” of The Way The Salt Falls goes from worse to bad, which is better than the other way around. Still, there’s hard-won hope at the end of the book.

Indy native Tracy Mishkin learned to swim at the JCC, and one of her poems takes place in the Regenstrief Indoor Lap Pool. She recently published her first full-length book of poetry, The Way The Salt Falls, with Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Tracy is also the author of three chapbooks, I almost Didn’t Make it to McDonald’s (Finishing Line Press, 2014), The Night I Quit Flossing (Five Oaks Press, 2016), and This is Still Life (Brain Mill Press, 2018). A graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Butler University, she lives around the corner from the J with her family and fewer than ten cats and dogs.