Twin Cities Book Festival
Minnesota State Fairgrounds, Progress Center and Fine Arts Building
1265 Snelling Ave N
St. Paul, MN 55108
United States
IN-PERSON EVENT. Central Time.
Join Brian Laidlaw at the Twin Cities Book Festival! The Adaptation Station is a magical switchyard where poems turn into songs. Bring an old favorite poem (or better yet, a new favorite poem from a book you just bought at the TCBF!) and poet-songwriter Brian Laidlaw will songify the text and set it to music on the fly. More details here!
Brian Laidlaw
Brian Laidlaw is the author of The Stuntman and The Mirrormaker. An accomplished musician, he has toured widely in the United States and Europe. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver.
Sharp, searching, and ecstatically musical, The Mirrormaker is a genre-expanding exploration of boom and bust—in mining economies and in young love.
These poems relocate the myth of Echo and Narcissus to the mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota. Drawing inspiration from the high school relationship between Bob Dylan and Echo Helstrom, they do with language what miners have always done to the earth: peel back the layers and extract what lies below the surface.