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Welcome to the official Still Life with Rope and River book launch event page!Still Life with Rope and River explores racism through a chorus of voices surrounding Emmett Till’s murder. Through research in combination with emotional truth, Williams Shen uses persona poems to dive deep into the psyche of both common and lesser known people and objects regarding Till’s lynching. Williams Shen also weaves in their own narrative and family history of how Blackness is dissected and dismissed, illustrating how the past is a ghost to the present.
Chavonn Williams Shen (she/they) is from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was a 2022 McKnight Writing fellow and a first runner-up for The Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Contest. She was also a Best of the Net Award finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a winner of the Loft Literary Center's Mentor Series, a fellow with the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, and an instructor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. A Bread Loaf, Tin House, VONA, and Hurston/Wright workshop alum, her writing has appeared in: Diode, Anomaly, AGNI, and others. Still Life with Rope and River is her debut book.
FEATURED READERS
Halee Kirkwood is a poet and teaching artist from the western Gitchigami region now living in Minneapolis. They were an inaugural and returning IN-NA-PO fellow in 2022 and 2023. They are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2022 Minnesota State Arts Board grant recipient. Kirkwood is the winner of the 2022 James Welch Poetry Prize, published with Poetry Northwest. Their work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Poem-A-Day, Nimrod International Journal, Seneca Review, Gulf Coast Journal and others. They are a first generation direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.
A. E. Wynter is Black writer, editor, and curator from New York. She currently lives in Saint Paul, MN, where she has organized readings, writing workshops, multimedia art exhibits, and other community events. Wynter has received multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series. Winner of The Florida Review 2024 Editors' Award in Poetry and the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry, her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in Torch Literary Arts, West Trade Review, and Water~Stone Review. Wynter was a 2023 resident at the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Moon Palace Books, 3032 Minnehaha Ave,Minneapolis,MN,United States
