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Virtual Avid Poetry Series: Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Jennifer K. Sweeney


Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Jennifer K. Sweeney
Event date: 
Wednesday, March 22, 2023 - 7:00pm

Event Location

Avid Bookshop on Zoom

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 SpellsHow 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.

Dear Outsiders: Poems By Jenny Sadre-Orafai Cover Image
$16.95
ISBN: 9781629222387
Availability: May be on our shelves (or available in 5-10 business days)
Published: University of Akron Press - March 7th, 2023

Foxlogic, Fireweed (The Backwaters Prize in Poetry) By Jennifer K. Sweeney Cover Image
$15.95
ISBN: 9781496222695
Availability: May be on our shelves (or available in 5-10 business days)
Published: The Backwaters Press - September 1st, 2020

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