Open Book Performance Hall
1011 Washington Avenue South
Suite 200
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. RSVP HERE.
Join us for the April entry in our monthly reading and panel discussion event series Milkweed Presents, hosted by Meltwater author Claire Wahmanholm! Claire will lead readings and a conversation, featuring Moheb Soliman, Halee Kirkwood, and Kathryn Kysar.
Enjoy a social hour and book-signing in our brick-and-mortar indie bookstore Milkweed Books beginning at 5 p.m., followed by the reading and conversation in the Open Book Performance Hall beginning at 6 p.m.
About the speakers
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder, Redmouth, and, most recently, Meltwater, which was a finalist for the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Minnesota Book Award. Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, High Country News, Blood Orange Review, The Anarchist Review of Books, and The Hopkins Review. A 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities.
Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest who’s presented work at literary, art, and public spaces around North America and abroad with support from diverse institutions. He was Program Director for the Arab American arts organization Mizna before receiving a multi-year Tulsa Artist Fellowship and most recently a Milkweed Editions fellowship. His debut poetry collection HOMES has been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Awards and featured in Ecotone Journal and Poets & Writers. It is about nature, modernity, identity, belonging, and sublimity through the site of the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland. www.mohebsoliman.info
Halee Kirkwood is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a Tin House Summer Workshop alumni, and an Indigenous Nations Poets (IN-NA-PO) fellow. They were awarded the 2022 James Welch Poetry Prize, published with Poetry Northwest. Kirkwood’s work can be found in Poetry Magazine, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, and others. Kirkwood is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, and is from the Twin Ports area.
Kathryn Kysar is the author of Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. Her work has recently appeared in About Place Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Mollyhouse, and Slag Glass City. She has received fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Write On, Door County. She teaches at the Loft Literary Center and resides near the Mississippi River.
Our Spring 2024 slate of Milkweed Presents includes:
February 14: Erin Sharkey
April 3: Claire Wahmanholm
May 2: Diane Wilson
May 23: Michael Kleber-Diggs
June 5: Beth Dooley
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 in Milkweed Books and the Performance Hall.
Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We believe that literature has the potential to change the way we see the world. Learn more at milkweed.org.
Claire Wahmanholm
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.
A haunting collection that inhabits a disquieting future where fear is the governing body, “the organ and the tissue / and the cell, the membrane and the organelle.”
Claire Wahmanholm maps an alien but unnervingly familiar world as it accelerates into cataclysm.