Join us for a reading with Luisa A. Igloria, who will read from her new poetry collection, Caulbearer. Luisa A. Igloria will be in conversation with David Bearinger for the event. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: In many cultures, a caul is considered talismanic; and a child born with it, possessing luck or protection. Luisa A. Igloria invokes this metaphor to weave poems exploring the veiled intervals of transition experienced by those in the diaspora—or by anyone who has felt a severing from their origins. The poems in Caulbearer enter spaces not only of nostalgia, loss, and impossible return. They also offer opportunities for glimpsing pleasure in the re-imagining and telling of our own stories, for as long and as many times as we need, in a world still full of beauty and mystery.
About the Author: Luisa A. Igloria is the winner of the 2023 Immigrant Series Prize for poetry for Caulbearer (Black Lawrence Press, 2024). She is the author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (2020), The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (2018), and twelve other books. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2015 Resurgence Poetry Prize in the UK—the world’s first major award for ecopoetry—and is lead editor of Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems on Climate Change in the United States (Paloma Press, 2023). Luisa is on the faculty of the MFA program at Old Dominion University; she also leads workshops for and is a member of the board of The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk. During her appointed term as the twentieth Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020–2022), Emerita, the Academy of American Poets awarded her one of twenty-three Poet Laureate Fellowships to support a program of public poetry projects. Find her online at luisaigloria.com.