What will Kentucky Book Festival visitors find on your table?

hopefully theyll find my three full length poetry collections, Deifying A Total Darkness (Harry Tankoos Books, 2020), To Emit Teal (Broadstone Books, 2020), The Second Stop Is Jupiter (Wayne State University Press, 2023) – collectively a loose trilogy of poems in conversation with each other; each book referencing the societal, the surrealistic, and the afrofuturistic (each focusing on one of those aspects more than the others, but each theme contained within each book).

Whom do you invite to stop by? Who will benefit from reading your book?

my books should appeal to academics, lovers of speculative narratives, anti-capitalists, and cultural revolutionaries.

Could you please tell us something curious about you and/or your book?

i have a wide, vivid imagination, but i dont believe that makes me a curious person; i’m not really curious about anything. what is is.

Is this your first time participating in Kentucky Book Festival? If yes – what are you looking
forward to the most? If you’ve participated before – what was your favorite experience at the
Festival?

this will be my third appearance at the KBF… however, i’m seriously reclusive so what i probably look forward to the most is returning home afterwards and taking my clothes off. but before all of that, i guess it’s always cool to introduce my work to readers looking for something beyond their usual preferences.

upfromsumdirt, Ron Davis, is an autodidactic poet and award-winning visual artist based in Lexington, KY. The Second Stop Is Jupiter is a deep engagement with the cultural narrative, populated with Black hero figures who will fuel the imagination.