Tombolo Books welcomes three incredible poets to the bookstore for a reading and discussion of their latest collections! This trio includes Asa Drake, Erin L. McCoy, and Helen Pruitt Wallace.

McCoy will be reading from her debut collection Wrecks which explores her experience with dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates her complicity in systems of structural racism, and her inheritance as the descendant of colonizers.

In her stunning debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, Drake witnesses firsthand the conflicts between art and patriotism, labor and longing. She reaches for the lush landscapes—real and recounted—of the Philippines and the American South as she traces the lineage of a body shaped by economic, ecological, and political dissonance.

"In her first book, Shimming the Glass House, Helen Wallace explores a range of subjects with lush language and a formal deftness that are deeply gratifying. If there is a presiding theme here, it is the tension between our `struggle for precision' and the poignant fact of the imperfection all around and within us." -Enid Shomer

Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House, and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have been published with The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, and The Georgia Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.

Erin L. McCoy’s debut novel, Underlake, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2026. Her poetry collection, Wrecks, was published by Noemi Press in October 2025 and was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. Erin’s poetry and fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Pleiades, Conjunctions, and other publications, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize.

Former Professor of Creative Writing at Eckerd College, Helen Pruitt Wallace received her Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing from Florida State University. From 2016 until 2022, she served as Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg, FL and currently hosts the Dalí Poetry Series at the Dalí Museum. The winner of a Florida Book Award, Helen’s first collection of poems, Shimming the Glass House, was chosen for the Richard Snyder Prize and published by Ashland Poetry Press. Her chapbook, Pink Streets, was published in 2016 by YellowJacket Press. Additionally, individual poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Harvard Review Online, The Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Nimrod International, Tampa Review, Plume, River Teeth, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and other journals and anthologies. Helen served as co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers published by Anhinga Press. She received a McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, The dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She and her husband Peter both grew up in St. Petersburg, and raised their children there.