Nandi Comer!

We’re very pleased to welcome Nandi Comer to Unbound this year. Nandi will be reading from her poetry collection, Tapping Out, and participating in our panel, Sports, Centered, where our guests will discuss how sports have informed their writing: Tapping Out (as you’ll gather from the cover, below) uses as its backdrop the relentless motions and blinding colors of lucha libre, the sport of Mexican freestyle wrestling.

It’s a stunning, beautiful book - but don’t, as they say, take our word for it. Here’s what co-keynote speaker Ross Gay has to say about it: “While Tapping Out is a fan’s intimate meditation on the many nuances of Lucha Libre, it is also a book about belonging. A book about what it means or takes to belong—to a culture, to a family, to a city—and also about what it takes from us to belong. There are few books I’ve read that have the same kind of difficult ardor, the same kind of honest, entangled love for a place, a home, as Tapping Out does. Nandi Comer’s book is an artifact of that love. It is heavy with it. It is florid with it. We are lucky to be in the midst of such love.”

Nandi Comer is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Northwestern University Press), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, and a Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, The Offing, and Southern Indiana Review. She currently serves as a poetry editor for Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora and as the Director of the Allied Media Projects Seeds Program.