Six Bridges Book Festival

Dr. Jehanne Dubrow & Maria Zoccola

PRESENTERS: Dr. Jehanne Dubrow & Maria Zoccola
BOOKS: Civilians & Helen of Troy, 1993
MODERATOR: Heather Hummel

About the authors:

Dr. Jehanne Dubrow is the author of three books of nonfiction and ten poetry collections. A craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, will be published by University of New Mexico Press in fall 2025. Her writing has appeared in New England Review, the Southern Review, and Ploughshares. She is a distinguished research professor at the University of North Texas.

Maria Zoccola is a poet and educator from Memphis. She has writing degrees from Emory University and Falmouth University, and has spent many years leading creative writing workshops for middle and high school youth. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize. Helen of Troy, 1993 is her debut poetry collection.

About the books:

The final volume in Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dubrow’s husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war leaves behind a life of uniforms and uniformity.

Part myth retelling, part character study, the poetry collection Helen of Troy, 1993 reimagines the Homeric Helen as a dissatisfied housewife in the hills of small-town Tennessee in the early 1990s. In poems with settings ranging from Chuck E. Cheese to football games to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen comes of age, marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she may not be ready to parent, and begins an affair that throws her whole life and future into chaos.