Hamline Midway Library
1558 W Minnehaha Ave.
Saint Paul, MN 55104
United States
Free and Open to the Public.
With cookies in one hand and coffee in the other, cozy up to the fire for six weeks of free readings. Now in its 23rd season, the Fireside Reading Series is one of The Friends’ oldest and most popular events. The series annually highlights the work of some of Minnesota’s finest writers who have published a new work in the previous year.
Fireside Reading Series: Lara Mimosa Montes, Chris Santiago, Sun Yung Shin. These gifted poets explore language, meaning, and identity in new and compelling ways with their new work. Lara Mimosa Montes, author of The Somnambulist. At once a writer’s memoir, coming-of-age story, family history, and true crime drama, Montes startling and powerful work weaves together multiple stories in fragments to create a compelling picture of a life becoming. Chris Santiago, author of Tula. Prismatic, startling, rich with meaning yet sparely composed, Chris Santiago’s debut collection of poems begins with one word and transforms it, in a dazzling sleight of hand, into a multivalent symbol for the immigrant experience. Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor. Who is guest, and who is host? Adoption, Antigone, zombies, clones, and minotaurs—all building blocks, forming and reforming our ideas.
Sign language interpretation and other accommodations are available with advance notice.
Chris Santiago
Tula: a ruined Toltec capital; a Russian city known for its accordions; Tagalog for “poem.” Inspired by the experiences of the second-generation immigrant who does not fully acquire the language of his parents, the winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry paints the portrait of a mythic homeland that is part ghostly underworld, part unknowable paradise.