MFA Student Book Celebration

With torrin a. greathouse and Zi Ning Mok
Event Date & Time
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Join the Creative Writing Program to celebrate the publication of new books by two current MFA students! Hear from torrin greathouse, who published Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (winner of the Ballard Spahr Poetry Prize) with Milkweed Editions, and Zi Ning Mok, who published The Orchid Folios with Ethos Books. Register for this Zoom event.

Cover image of torrin greathouse's Wound from the Mouth of a Wound with black background and full body image of Medusa with gold snakes in hair like a halo, a man's head in one hand and a sword in the other, with purple rips in the body and flowering vine

More on greathouse's poetry collection from the publisher: "'Some girls are not made,' torrin a. greathouse writes, 'but spring from the dirt.' Winner of the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem. greathouse celebrates 'buckteeth & ulcer.' She odes the pulp of a bedsore. She argues that the vestigial is not devoid of meaning, and in kinetic and vigorous language, she honors bodies the world too often wants dead. These poems ache, but they do not surrender. Their imagery pulses on the page, fractal and fluid, blooming in a medley of forms: broken essays, haibun born of erasure, a sonnet meant to be read in the mirror. greathouse’s poetry demands more of language and those who wield it. 'I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak / me into a funeral.' . . . greathouse—elegant, vicious, 'a one-girl armageddon' draped in crushed velvet—teaches us that fragility is not synonymous with flaw."

Cover image of Mok Zining's The Orchid Folios with deep blue background, art of two orchids (red and yellow) plus blueish gnarled orchid roots/stems, hot pink title and author text

More on Mok's mixed genre work from the publisher: "A pot shatters. An arrangement falls apart. A florist finds herself amidst the scattered leaves of history. At once a poetry collection and a documentary novella, The Orchid Folios reimagines the orchid as a living, breathing document of history: a history that enmeshes the personal, colonial, linguistic, and biotechnological with the Vanda Miss Joaquim, the symbol of Singapore’s postcolonial hybridity. While the Orchid has shaped the fantastical narratives that govern our multiracial City in a Garden, it continues to shape-shift and bloom on its own terms, challenging us to imagine a decolonized Singapore. This is the organism at the heart of The Orchid Folios—by turns stark and unruly, documenting and challenging the narratives that are the roots of our national consciousness."

To request an accommodation or for inquiries about accessibility, please contact Terri Sutton at sutt0063@umn.edu.

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