Event Location
Avid Bookshop presents a Virtual Avid Poetry Series event featuring Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Jennifer K. Sweeney. This reading and conversation will take place on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, from 7pm - 8pm EST via Zoom.
To attend this event, register for a ticket using this form.
ABOUT THE POETS AND FEATURED BOOKS:
How do you map grief? Set in a small tourist town, two siblings attempt to navigate and survive an unfamiliar landscape after their parents' deaths while trying to simultaneously forget and remember them. Dear Outsiders explores how we are part of and stranger to our environments and to our families and how identities form by where and who we come from. The collection is a map of isolation and longing and of what it means to be deserted and alive.
Jenny Sadre-Orafai is an Iranian-Mexican-American poet and writer. She is the co-author of Book of Levitations and the author of Malak and Paper, Cotton, Leather. Recent poetry appears in Cream City Review, Ninth Letter, The Cortland Review, and Hotel Amerika. Recent prose appears in VIDA Review, Fourteen Hills, and The Los Angeles Review. She is co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly, Professor of English at Kennesaw State University, and Executive Director of Georgia Writers Association.
Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Jennifer K. Sweeney’s Foxlogic, Fireweed follows a lyrical sequence of five physical and emotional terrains—floodplain, coast, desert, suburbia, and mesa—braiding themes of nature, domesticity, isolation, and human relationships. These are poems of the earth’s wild heart, its searing mysteries, its hollows, and its species, poems of the complex domestic space, of before and after motherhood, gun terror, the election, of dislocation and home, and of how we circle toward and away from our centers. Sweeney is not afraid to take up the domestic and inner lives of women, a nuanced relationship with the natural world that feels female or even maternal, or a duty to keeping alive poetry’s big questions of transcendence, revelation, awe, and deep presence in the ordinary.
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three other poetry collections, including Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The recipient of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Pushcart Prize, she teaches at the University of Redlands in California.
