November 5 at 7pm
the river's end bookstore presents:
Laura Donnelly in conversation with poet Katherine Bode-Lang
to discuss Donnelly's recent release Midwest Gothic.
Admission to this event is free. Register here.
A signed copy of the book can be purchased from the river's end bookstore below!
Laura Donnelly is the author of Watershed, which won the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, and Midwest Gothic, which was selected by Maggie Smith for the Snyder Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. Originally from Michigan, Laura attended Hope College and received her MFA from Purdue University and PhD from Western Michigan University. She and her husband Ben moved to Oswego in 2013 when she joined the creative writing faculty at SUNY Oswego. She is an amateur gardener, a board member at Sterling Nature Center, and a devotee of the Great British Baking Show.
Katherine Bode-Lang is the author of The Reformation, which won the American Poetry Review /Honickman First Book Prize in 2014, and a chapbook, Spring Melt. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Subtropics, and Rattle. Born and raised in western Michigan, she graduated from Hope College and earned her MFA in poetry from Penn State University, where she is a director in the Office for Research Protections. Katherine lives in central Pennsylvania with her husband, daughter, and their pandemic adoptee cat, Luna.
(This book cannot be returned.)
We are thrilled to be offering signed copies of this title! Your purchase will include an invitation to our virtual event with the author on November 5th at 7pm. More event info here.
Your order will be a signed first edition while supplies last!
Laura Donnelly Artist Statement:
Midwest Gothic explores the lives of my mother and grandmothers in the rural Midwest, as well as my own reckoning with place, family, and religion. The poems emerge from family stories and snapshots of memory – my mother canning tomatoes, my great-grandmother weaving rag rugs.At the heart of Midwest Gothic is the image of the garden, both the literal acres at my childhood home and grandparents’ farms, and the archetypal gardens of religion, myth, and literature. My influences include H.D., Louise Glück, Frances Hodgson Burnett, the Grimm Brothers, and my mother’s perennial gardens.
Writing Midwest Gothic, I wanted to honor the strong women in my past, while asking, more broadly, what we keep and what we leave behind of the places that make us.
Laura Donnelly is the author of Watershed, which won the 2013 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, and Midwest Gothic, which was selected by Maggie Smith for the Snyder Prize at Ashland Poetry Press. Originally from Michigan, Laura attended Hope College and received her MFA from Purdue University and PhD from Western Michigan University. She and her husband Ben moved to Oswego in 2013 when she joined the creative writing faculty at SUNY Oswego. She is an amateur gardener, a board member at Sterling Nature Center, and a devotee of the Great British Baking Show.
