Book Celebration with Dr. Ann Wallace: "Keeping Room"

Ann E. Wallace, Ph.D., the Director of the Writing Center and Professor of English at NJCU, will host an on-campus celebration to honor the release of her third full-length poetry collection, "Keeping Room" (Nixes Mate, 2026). Dr. Wallace is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City.

"Keeping Room" is an intimate collection grounded in familial spaces of home and garden. The poems grapple with the nature of survival, and the survival of nature, as experienced by a woman living with chronic illness in an overdeveloped city with a shrinking natural footprint. The collection spools from the pain of chronic illness and grief, to the loss of political freedoms, to the disrupted urban (and global) landscape. However, despite despair and uncertainty, the poems reach for hope, love, and strength in the unlikely places where they may be found, with a steady turn toward nature and healing, or often, healing through nature, throughout the collection.