Inner Moonlight is the monthly poetry reading series for the Wild Detectives in Dallas. The in-person show is the second Wednesday of every month in the Wild Detectives backyard. We love our podcast fans, so we release recordings of the live performances every month for y'all! On Friday 2/21/25, we featured poet Rachel Richardson to launch her newest collection, Smother (W. W. Norton, 2025), joined by Dallas poets Nomi Stone and Tarfia Faizullah.
Rachel Richardson is the author of Smother, just out from W. W. Norton, and two previous books of poems, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave, from the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and an NEA Fellow, and her poems have appeared in the New York Times, APR, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California. She is also currently in training as a wildland firefighter.
Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire, first prize in the Middle East Studies Award from the American Anthropological Association and three other national prizes. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, Stone’s poems recently appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, Best American Poetry, POETRY Magazine, and American Poetry Review. Stone was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropology at Princeton and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Tarfia Faizullah writes books and teaches poetry at UNT.
www.innermoonlightpoetry.com