We are in love with words, especially the printed word. Riverbank Bookshop launched in Spring of 2026, in the midst of a national dumpster fire of funding cuts to the literary arts, and the rise of AI– a time when real books, written by real people remain essential to our understanding of humanity. We are actively against book banning! We encourage literary community and joy, and we promote diversity of authors, genres, and readers. We are a pop-up bookshop coming to a gathering space along the riverbank of the Ohio, near you!
This is us! We’re poets, and now we run a pop-up bookshop!
AMELIA MARTENS is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (2016), a book of prose poems, selected by Sarabande Books for the 2014 Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature. She received both an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education from Indiana University and currently serves as a training facilitator working with folks who experience multiple barriers to employment. Her creative work has been supported by the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She is also the author of four poetry chapbooks: Ursa Minor (winner of the 2017 Prose Poetry Prize from elsewhere magazine, 2018), A Series of Faults (Finishing Line Press, 2014), Clatter (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2013), and Purgatory (winner of the Spring 2010 Black River Chapbook competition; Black Lawrence Press, 2012).
BRITTON SHURLEY is the author of the chapbook Spinning the Vast Fantastic (Bull City Press, 2021), and his poetry has appeared in such journals as Southern Humanities Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Southern Indiana Review. He is the recipient of Emerging Artist Awards from the Kentucky Arts Council in both 2011 and 2016 and frequently serves as a poetry instructor at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.
