Poetry Reading & Book Signing with Sasha Debevec-McKenney

We warmly welcome home Sasha Debevec-McKenney, who returns to Windsor to read from Joy is My Middle Name,  the recently published first collection of her poetry. Along with the reading, Sasha will be signing books. Free to attend, but RSVP for this event is encouraged due to limited seating (walk-ins are still welcome). To reserve a book for purchase, please click here. 

Sasha Debevec-McKenney is the author of the poetry collection Joy Is My Middle Name. She received her MFA from New York University. She was the 2020–2021 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University. Her poems have appeared in places like The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Drift, and Granta. She grew up in Windsor, Connecticut and is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University.

This event is being held in collaboration with Windsor Historical Society, Grace Episcopal Church, and House of Books and Games. 

MORE ABOUT JOY IS MY MIDDLE NAME 

From W. W. Norton & Company Publishing

One of The New Yorker‘s Best Books and Essential Reads of 2025, Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award. Hilarious, moving, and accessible, the poems in this extraordinary debut interrogate patriotism in a deeply flawed country.

In her best imitation of a historian, poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney combs through the past. Joy Is My Middle Name is about crawling through your twenties and emerging into your thirties. Walking uneasily through cities and rural towns, talking about sex, race, womanhood, addiction, sobriety, consumerism, and pop culture, these poems pull at the edges of the performed self with ease.

This remarkable debut collection showcases Debevec-McKenney’s intimate, assured, conversational voice. Full of stories, character, awkward silences, and actual jokes, Joy Is My Middle Name seamlessly traces the author’s search for herself and examines how she gets in her own way, brings humor and lightness to rock-bottom moments, and considers the shamelessly girly as a serious cultural artifact.

All the while, Debevec-McKenney uses her own life to get revenge on the version of American history we’re taught in school. She brilliantly weaves together the political and the personal, maps the interior onto the exterior, and vice versa. Humble, giddy, ridiculous, bold, deep, empathetic, difficult, ragged, strange, erratic, and lithe, Joy Is My Middle Name is the most open conversation with your greatest friend, over the best dinner, the buzz of life’s perfect—and not-so-perfect—moments funneled onto the page.