268. Ruth Dickey with Rebecca Hoogs: Our Hollowness Sings — Poetry Celebrating Resilience

Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Our Hollowness Sings by Ruth Dickey explores human brokenness, navigating themes of loss, grief, and the quest for healing. Through seasons of profound absence, particularly the loss of her mother, Dickey crafts a poetic journey tethered to the earth, transforming grief into affirmations and blessings.

The collection celebrates the human spirit’s resilience, offering striking insights into everyday spaces and the complexities of life. With honesty, humor, and heartbreak, Dickey’s poems embrace the full spectrum of human experience, transcending pain to reach for joy and renewal. In navigating devastation with precision and grace, she guides readers through the delicate balance of memory, sorrow, and the enduring power of connection and imagination.

Ruth Dickey is the executive director of the National Book Foundation and has spent over twenty-five years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. She was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and served as a judge in fiction for the 2019 National Book Awards. The recipient of a Mayor’s Arts Award from DC, Ruth’s first book, Mud Blooms (Harbor Mountain Press, 2019), was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and received a 2019 Silver Nautilus. Our Hollowness Sings is her second book.

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of Self-Storage (Stephen F. Austin University Press) which was a finalist for the 2013 Washington State Book Award in Poetry, and a chapbook, Grenade (GreenTower Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, FIELD, Crazyhorse, and others. She is the Executive Director of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

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Phinney Books