Bottom Feeders
Arielle Hebert & Asa Drake
September 2, 2026
The Lynx Books (601 South Main Street)
6–7 PM
A vibrant and gritty debut from poet Arielle Hebert, Bottom Feeders is a queer coming-of-age collection set in late 2000s Florida, during the height of the opioid epidemic. Here, overdoses, red tide blooms, and hurricanes are as much a part of growing up as fleeting teenage desires, beach parties, and prom.
This is a landscape of glitter and grime, where young love is tested by the tides of addiction and recovery. The collection thrums with a sense of spectacle and surreality, accented by Sarasota’s history as a circus town and Florida’s deadly wildlife—alligators, needlefish, invasive snakes. The heat, humidity, and salt air of the Gulf become characters in their own right, as haunting as the love, grief, and loss found here. Despite the long shadows cast over these poems, there is beauty, friendship, chosen family, and hope….
About the Speakers
Arielle Hebert is a queer poet based in North Carolina with roots in Florida and Louisiana. Her debut poetry collection, Bottom Feeders (Black Lawrence Press, 2026), was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Slowdown, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Great River Review, and others. Hebert is the 2025–2026 fellow at Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual writing conference celebrating poetry, environmental science, and community to bring about a joyful rising in a climate-changed world. She is the Director of Operations and Marketing at Blair, a nonprofit publisher focused on emerging and diverse writers.
Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press, 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, Kenyon Review Residential Writers Workshop, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Storyknife, Sundress Publications, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems are published or forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Poetry, and Sewanee Review. A former librarian, she currently works as a teaching artist.
This event is free and open to the public.
“Bottom Feeders” is presented by The Lynx Books and co-sponsored by Imagining Climate Change.