Nandi Comer is the Poet Laureate of Michigan. She is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow.  Her poems and essays have appeared in Green Mountains Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, and others.  She is the co-director of Detroit Lit.

While Tapping Out is a fan’s intimate meditation on the many nuances of Lucha Libre, it is also a book about belonging. A book about what it means or takes to belong—to a culture, to a family, to a city—and also about what it takes from us to belong. There are few books I’ve read that have the same kind of difficult ardor, the same kind of honest, entangled love for a place, a home, as Tapping Out does. Nandi Comer’s book is an artifact of that love. It is heavy with it. It is florid with it. We are lucky to be in the midst of such love.”

—Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights