About this Event
Join us at Mrs. Dalloway's Bookstore on Thursday, February 27th at 7:00 PM when award winning Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson and author Lauren Markham come to the store to share Rachel's latest collection Smother: Poems and Lauren's new book Immemorial. Both will sign copies of their books after the presentation.
Click Here to preorder a copy of Smother
Click Here to preorder a copy of Immemorial
About Smother -
How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Rachel Richardson’s third collection, Smother, interrogates this impossible question. But these are not poems of giving up. The poems in Smother gather accomplices, remember the dead, keep watch at the firebreaks, and plant new trees on the burn scars. These poems sing their song of resistance made from the music that is available to us now.
About Immemorial -
In a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay, Markham reflects on the design and function of memorials, from the traditional to the speculative—the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, a converted Pr*son in Ljubljana, a “ghost forest” of dead cedar trees in a Manhattan park—in an attempt to reckon with the grief of climate catastrophe. Can memorials look toward the future as they do to the past? How can we create “a psychic space for feeling” while spurring action and agitating for change?
RACHEL RICHARDSON is the author of Smother (Norton, 2025) and two other poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the co-founder of Left Margin LIT as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Yale Review, APR, and elsewhere. In 2024 she was named an inaugural Artists-in-Fire Resident through the Confluence Lab, and has completed FFT2 wildland firefighter training. She teaches as Distinguished Visiting Writer in the MFA program at St. Mary's College, and lives in Berkeley.
LAUREN MARKHAM is the award-winning author of Immemorial, A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging, and The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life. Her essays and reportage regularly appears in outlets such as the Atlantic, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She teaches writing and has spent over fifteen years working at the intersection of education and immigration. She is currently at work on a novel.
THIS EVENT is free but registration is requested. Registration ends at 5:30 pm on February 27th, 2025.
BECAUSE SEATING is limited, please register only if you plan to attend.
DUE TO SPACE limitations, we may not be able to accommodate every person at an event, so early registration is encouraged.
WALK-INS will be accommodated only if space allows.
WE ASK that attendees arrive between 6:45 and 7:00 PM for the event.
PLEASE leave your non-support companion animals at home.
- OUR shared restrooms are not accessible after 6:30 PM, please plan accordingly.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Mrs Dalloway's, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, United States
USD 0.00
