Milkweed Books
1011 S Washington Avenue
Suite 107
Minneapolis, MN 55415
United States
This event is free and open to the public. RSVPs are encouraged but not required.
Kathryn Nuernberger will read from her newest collection, Held: Essays in Belonging, and join in conversation with Angela Pelster. There will be book sales and signing.
ABOUT THE BOOK
From award-winning author Kathryn Nuernberger, Held is a collection of essays about mutualisms, mutual aid, and ways of being together in a time of climate crisis.
Held is a collection about living in and with the consequences of terrible mistakes and contemplates our collective experiences of loss in an age of climate change and mass extinctions, as well as more personal tragedies. Each essay in this book describes a remarkable instance of symbiotic mutualism: bobtail squid host glow-in-the-dark bacteria behind their eyes so they can camouflage with moonlight on the water; there is a surprisingly erotic encounter between ants and a rove beetle; beavers and willow trees together turn deserts to verdant wetlands; and many more. To read Held is to be reminded of one’s humanity and of our interconnectedness with the world that surrounds us.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kathryn Nuernberger is an essayist and poet who writes about the history of science and ideas, renegade women, plant medicines, and witches. Her latest book is Held: Essays in Belonging, which is about symbiotic mutualisms, climate change, and finding family at the end of the world. She is also the author of The Witch of Eye and the poetry collections, RUE, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. Her first lyric essay collection, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, won the The Journal Non/Fiction Award. Other awards include the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA fellowship, and notable essays in the Best American series. She is a Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at University of Minnesota.
Angela Pelster is the author of the essay collection Limber, a winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for nonfiction. She was a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellow chosen by Hanif Abdurraqib. Her writing has appeared in LitHub, Orion, Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta, The Kenyon Review, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. She’s been a Katherine Bakeless Nason Bread Loaf Fellow in nonfiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee, and was an Iowa Arts fellow during her MFA at the University of Iowa. She currently teaches at Hamline University and lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her next book, The Evolution of Fire, is forthcoming with Milkweed in April 2025.
