The Weather Inside: Poetry Reading with Stevie Edwards in Conversation with Liza Flum

Join Stevie Edwards for a poetry reading in conversation with Liza Flum! About the book: In The Weather Inside, Stevie Edwards measures the emotional atmosphere of a mind navigating bipolar disorder, complex PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, and alcoholism while forging intimacy and creative resilience in a rapidly declining world. Both as someone who has struggled with mental health and as a feminist approaching middle age, Edwards interrogates parenthood and marriage: What forms of nurturing survive when traditional roles and certainties do not? Can bringing children into a collapsing world still be an act of hope? When your partner does not want children, where should you divert your surfeit of love? The poet grieves, “I am chanting the name of a daughter / my husband doesn’t want / enough, the child I’ve spent years / not being sure I deserved.” This fiercely honest and intimate collection offers a vision of adulthood shaped by the capacity to inhabit an embattled inner world. With clarity and dark wit, Edwards probes the uneasy border between solitude and connection, asserting the relationship between caring for oneself and caring for the wider world. About the author: Dr. Stevie Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University and Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of The Weather Inside (University of Arkansas Press, 2026), Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). She holds a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, she now lives in South Carolina with her spouse and a small herd of rescue pitbulls. Her work has been supported by Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, SAFTA Firefly Farms, and Buinho Creative Hub.