Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.
Join us as Milkweed Books welcomes Lauren Russell for the launch of her new collection, A Window That Can Neither Close Nor Open, out August 27th. In A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close, the stakes of writing are also the stakes of living. “Though I no longer wanted to die,” writes Lauren Russell, “our first years together were not easy … because I also did not want to live.” From this enigmatic in-between, Russell dives into multitudes: cats and questions; compulsion and devotion; narrative and diagnosis; language and loneliness; scrupulosity and stasis; suicidality and love. After a reading, Lauren will be joined in conversation by Johanna Furhman and local poet Paula Cisewski.
About the authors:
LAUREN RUSSELL is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close; Descent, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush. Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Millay Arts, Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the New York Times Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and lives in Baltimore with her cats, Cat Jeoffry and Lady Day.
PAULA CISEWSKI is a poet, artist, educator, editor, and curator. Her hybrid book, Ceremonies for No Repair, is newly released from Beauty School Editions, LLC, and her poetry collection, The Becoming Game, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press in spring of 2025. She is also the author of Quitter (Diode Editions Book Prize winner), The Threatened Everything, Ghost Fargo (Nightboat Poetry Prize winner, selected by Franz Wright), Upon Arrival, and several chapbooks.
JOANNA FUHRMAN, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021) and the forthcoming Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day newsletter, The Slowdown and Having a Coke with You podcasts and in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She first published with Hanging Loose Press as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.
Lauren Russell
Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close; Descent, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush.
