About this Event
Please join us as we welcome debut author OKWUDILI NEBEOLISA to Milkweed Books to read from his collection . He will be joined in conversation by poet .
ABOUT THE BOOK
Okwudili Nebeolisa’s debut poetry collection, Terminal Maladies, serves as an intimate exploration of the relationship between a mother and son and their emotional journey during her battle with cancer. Throughout the book, Nebeolisa attempts to reconcile his guilt of starting a new life in the United States, far away from his mother and his home in Nigeria.
Depicting tender moments, Terminal Maladies highlights how the poet and his family shoulder the responsibility of caregiving together and how Nebeolisa works to bridge the physical, and at times, emotional, distance between them. He wonders: “I don’t understand / her smile or why she would be submerged / in pain and wouldn’t want to admit it. / Who did this to our mothers?” The book questions his Nigerian mother’s need to act brave and a son’s need to protect.
Terminal Maladies reminds us that grief is inevitable, yet unique to each of us, and serves as a tribute to Nebeolisa’s mother and is a necessary read for anyone who has faced the challenges of caring for a loved one.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
OKWUDILI NEBEOLISA is the author of Terminal Maladies, winner of the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Prize. He graduated from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he was a Provost Fellow and won the Prairie Lights Prize for Fiction. He is currently an MFA student at the University of Minnesota where he won the Gesell Award for Excellence in Poetry. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Image, Sewanee Review, New England Review, and Threepenny Review, while his prose has appeared in Catapult and Evergreen Review. He’s a recipient of support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Granum Foundation, and the Center for the Arts Crested Butte.
DONIKA KELLY is the author of , winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary, the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Open Book, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis, United States
USD 0.00
