Milkweed Presents Jennifer Eli Bowen book launch featuring V.V. Ganeshananthan

Join Milkweed Editions and V.V. Ganeshananthan as we launch Jennifer Eli Bowen’s debut book The Book of Kin at Open Book in Minneapolis. The authors will read and then discuss Jennifer’s new book and craft, followed by book sales and a signing.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails.

“What’s our obligation to each other?” asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country’s largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.

Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it’s missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems—from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.

Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that “harm is shared, and healing is too.”

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, The Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, The Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. The founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she lives in St. Paul, a block in any direction from sidewalk poetry and snow.

V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, the 2023 Asian Prize for Fiction, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an NPR Book of the Year) and Love Marriage (longlisted for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post). Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, where she is a McKnight Presidential Fellow and professor of English. Since 2017, she has co-hosted Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.