A memoir-in-poems exploring the complexities of mercy in an immigrant family haunted by generational violenceAbout this Event
Writer, dancer, filmmaker, and professor Serena Chopra launches her collection of poetry, A Catalog of Future Mercies, a memoir-in-poems exploring the complexities of mercy in an immigrant family haunted by generational violence. She is joined by poet, essayist, and educator Divya Victor.
A lyrical exploration of mercy as resistance to cyclical violence told in ghost stories and family histories
In this luminous poetic memoir, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy and cyclical violence in an immigrant family. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to survive, to love and care for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. Through divinatory poetics and cross-temporal storytelling, she grapples with national histories of violence and the imperative to stay present with lineages of traumas rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A three-dimensional tapestry that constellates meaning through ecstatic repetition and rearrangement, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.
Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, and an alumna RedLine Resident Artist. Chopra is an associate professor of creative writing at Seattle University.
Divya Victor (b. 1983) is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Divya is the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, W.W. Norton’s The Seagull Reader, and boundary2. Her next book, KIN, a collection of essays, received a 2025 Creative Capital Award and is due out from Graywolf in 2027. She is Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she directs the Creative Writing program.
Event Venue
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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