In person: Didi Jackson book launch with Milkweed Books

Please join Milkweed Books as we welcome DIDI JACKSON in celebrating her newest collection , from Red Hen Press. Poets KATE NUERNBERGER, PETER CAMPION, and MITA MAHATO will be joining to for a lively discussion around ekphrastic work and how poetry and visual art intersect.

ABOUT THE BOOK

In her second collection, DIDI JACKSON continues her exploration of the paradoxical meaning of a world where joy and sorrow simultaneously coexist. These poems investigate both sacred and natural spaces. Her poems move grief and emotional suffering to language as a site of recovery and renewal. Much of this collection is ordered around the work of the Swedish visual artist Hilma af Klint. As the first artist to arguably use abstraction, her radical work brims with enigmatic botanical images painted to grasp the seemingly boundless and hermetic realm of the dead. Similarly, Jackson’s poems explore plant life and natural species in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where perceived thresholds blur in acts of spiritual reimagining. This is a book that questions all that is endless, all that has been thought as limiting, and all that remains unknown.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

DIDI JACKSON is the author of the poetry collections My Infinity (2024) and (2020). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bomb, The New Yorker, and Oxford American among other journals and magazines. She has had poems selected for Best American Poetry, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day and The Slow Down with Tracy K. Smith. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where she teaches creative writing. Most recently she completed her certification as a Tennessee Naturalist.

PETER CAMPION is the author of four collections of poems, the essay collection , and several monographs and catalog essays on modern and contemporary visual art. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, he teaches in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Minnesota.

MITA MAHATO is the author and artist of (The 3rd Thing, 2024). Her poetry comix have appeared in places including PRISM, Ecotone, Iterant, Shenandoah, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat, as well as in the collection In Between, published by Pleiades and listed in The Best American Comics of 2019. Her work has been supported by Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Mineral School, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and The Arctic Circle. She currently lives in Seattle.

KATHRYN NUERNBERGER is the author of the poetry collections, RUE, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. She has also written the essay collections The Witch of Eye and Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Her awards include the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA fellowship, and “notable” essays in the Best American series. HELD: Essays in Aftermaths, a collection of flash essays about symbiotic mutualisms and ways of being together, will be published by Sarabande Books in November 2025. Her co-authored textbook with Maya Jewell Zeller, , was published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2024.

Event Venue

Milkweed Books, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, United States