Bloodroom: An Evening with Kay E. Bancroft

Bloodroom is a howling, scorching debut collection of deftly formatted poetry-circling, and delicately probing, themes of familial debt, legacy, obligation, and the matriline. Through an index of past wounds and inherited scars, the speaker bleeds their histories together with the slow erosion of nostalgia. These poems offer an incisive and scalding interrogation of gender, yet are often unbearably tender-a swirling emulsion of grief and anger poured into an intricately technical and beautifully challenging mold. Each piece draws out a tragic, cyclical song of love and loss, resentment and admiration, as though drawing poison from a wound. Bancroft's writing is meditative, cleansing, and compulsively readable: recounting a feminine childhood transformed into something monstrous until seen through a new lens.

Bloodroom is a plea to identity, to the process of searching for purpose and of seeking certainty in a broken world.

6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Bloodroom will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Downbound Books.

About Kay E. Bancroft

Kay E. Bancroft is a writer, educator, and artist from Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA in Rhetoric and Professional Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Their writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Pleiades Journal, RHINO Poetry, Passengers Journal, The Rumpus, & more. Explore more of their work at kayebancroftpoet.com

About Taylor Byas

Dr. Taylor Byas, Ph.D. is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she is a Features Editor for The Rumpus, an Editorial Advisor for Jackleg Press, a member of the Beloit Poetry Journal Editorial Board, and a Poetry Editor-at-Large for Texas Review Press. Her debut full-length, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times from Soft Skull Press, won the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award, the 2023 Chicago Review of Books Award in Poetry, and the 2024 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. Her second full-length, Resting Bitch Face (2025), was a September 2025 pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club. She is also a coeditor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol X: Alabama, from Texas Review Press, and Poemhood: Our Black Revival, a YA anthology from HarperCollins. She is represented by Noah Grey Rosenzweig at Triangle House Literary.

About Eliza Guerra
Eliza Guerra is the author of the chapbook Feral Ecology (Bottlecap Press). Her first full-length poetry book, Holograms in the Field, won the inaugural Gasher Book Award.