Please join the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library and Friendly City Books for a joint event to close out Banned Books Week on September 24! We'll have a special presentation by the nonprofit Big House Books, followed by lunch and a poetry reading with Melissa Ginsburg, T.K. Lee, and Jacqueline Allen Trimble. Their newest books will be on sale and available for signing after the reading.

BIG HOUSE BOOKS is a non-profit, volunteer organization that sends free books by request to prisoners in Mississippi correctional facilities in order to promote literacy and be a vehicle for change for prison reform.

MELISSA GINSBURG is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost and the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, West Branch, Fence, the Southwest Review, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi and serves as associate editor of Tupelo Quarterly.

T.K. LEE is an award-winning member of the Dramatists Guild of America, the Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, among others. In addition to poetry and drama, he has also crafted prize-winning short fiction and is core faculty in the nationally ranked MFA programs in Creative Writing as well as in Theatre Education, at the historic Mississippi University for Women.

JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, a Cave Canem Fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. American Happiness, her debut collection (NewSouth Books, 2016), won the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and journals including Poetry Magazine, The Offing, The Louisville Review, The Rumpus, and Poet Lore. She is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University.