Please join us for an in-person event to celebrate the release of REMOVAL ACTS by Erin Marie Lynch! For this event, Erin Marie Lynch will be joined by George Abraham, Elise Paschen, and Kira Tucker.
Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.
Drawing its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands, this remarkable debut collection reckons with the present-day repercussions of historical violence. Through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.
Removal Acts takes its speaker’s fraught methods of accessing the past as both subject and material: family photos, the fragile artifacts of primary documents, and the digital abyss of web browsers and word processors. Alongside studies of two of her Dakota ancestors, Lynch has assembled an intimate record of recovery from bulimia, insisting that self-erasure cannot be separated from the erasures of genocide. In these rigorous, scrutinizing examinations of “removal” in its many forms—as physical displacement, archival absence, Whiteness, and vomit—Lynch has crafted a harrowing portrait of the entwined relationship between the personal and historical. The result is a powerful affirmation of resilience and resolute presence in the face of eradication.
Erin Marie Lynch is the author of Removal Acts, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in October 2023. Her writing appears in POETRY, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Hugo House. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, as well as an associate editor at Air/Light magazine.
George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are currently executive editor for Mizna, and are a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, The Arab American National Museum, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, National Performance Network, and more. They are currently co-editing a Palestinian global anglophone poetry anthology with Noor Hindi (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University.
Elise Paschen is the author of The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities, winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have appeared in The Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, Best American Poetry, and Poetry, among other anthologies and magazines. She has edited and co-edited many anthologies, including, most recently The Eloquent Poem. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Kira Tucker (she/they) is a poet from Memphis and a recent MFA+MA graduate from Northwestern University. A recipient of fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Kira currently serves as Assistant Managing Editor for TriQuarterly. She is now at work on her hopeful debut book collection—a poetic investigation spanning the mythos of the American Dream and the landscapes of our collective unconscious.
Accessibility: This event will be at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Face masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. For ASL Interpretation to be made available, please submit a request by emailing events@womenandchildrenfirst.com. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.
