In person: Eiren Caffall with Claire Wahmanholm

Join Milkweed Books and poet Claire Wahmanholm as we welcome Eiren Caffall to Minneapolis to launch her two new books, The Mourner’s Bestiary and All the Water in the World.

Eiren will read from both titles and talk about her creative process with Claire, followed by a Q+A and book signing.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Eiren Caffall is an author and musician based in Chicago. Her writing on loss and nature, oceans and extinction has appeared in Orion, The Writer’s Digest, Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and the anthology Elementals: Volume IV: Fire (The Center for Humans and Nature, 2024). She has received a 2023 Whiting Award in Creative Nonfiction, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and residencies at the Banff Centre, Millay Colony, MacDowell Colony (waitlisted), Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. She is the author of the memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary (Row House Publishing, 2024) and the novel All the Water in the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2025).

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater, Redmouth, and Wilder, which won the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry and the Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Grist, RHINO, Los Angeles Review, Fairy Tale Review, Bennington Review, DIAGRAM, The Journal, and Kenyon Review Online, and have been featured by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in the Twin Cities.

ABOUT THE BOOKS

All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they’ve saved.

Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story–with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most — love and work, community and knowledge — will survive.

A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems–the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound–and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores. The Gulf of Maine is the world’s fastest-warming marine ecosystem, and the Long Island Sound has been the site of conservation battles that predict the fights ahead for the Gulf.