In Person: Milkweed Presents: Bodies in Nature, Nature in Body, hosted by Erin Sharkey

Join us for the return of our monthly reading and panel discussion event series Milkweed Presents, hosted by A Darker Wilderness editor Erin Sharkey! Erin will lead readings and a conversation about the intertwined and symbiotic relationship that nature has with our bodies, with special guest speakers Aegor Ray, Davi Gray, and Anaïs Deal-Márquez.

Please join us in-person at the Open Book Performance Hall at 6 PM for an unforgettable reading and discussion, and come early for a social hour at Milkweed Books, our brick-and-mortar independent bookstore, at 5:30 PM!

Milkweed Presents is a monthly event series featuring Milkweed authors as curators of conversation with local writers and community organizers on a topic of their choosing. These events are held in-person at Open Book Performance hall, on Wednesdays once a month.

Our Spring 2024 slate of Milkweed Presents includes:

February 14: Erin Sharkey

March 6: Michael Kleber-Diggs

April 3: Claire Wahmanholm

May 1: Diane Wilson

About the speakers

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution (Hulu), which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2021, Sharkey was awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

aegor ray is a writer, organizer, and freak living in Minneapolis. He is writing a novel.

Davi Gray is a queer, trans, nonbinary poet, writer, artist, storyteller, activist, and abolitionist, living in Minneapolis, on lands taken from the Dakota and Ojibwe. They have won several prizes in PEN America Prison Writing Contests; been nominated for an AWP Intro prize, received Honorable Mention in the 2023 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry contest, and have work published or forthcoming in Rogue Agent, NonBinary Review, and elsewhere. They can often be found performing at open mics around the Twin Cities.

Anaïs Deal-Márquez is a writer based in Minneapolis, with roots across the U.S.-Mexico border whose work looks at identity, displacement, and memory. She is the founder of Border Voices, which uses storytelling and performance to curate shows and conversations that center immigrant and refugee voices of folks of color. She has completed her first poetry manuscript which weaves memory, tradition, and migration.