Caroline M. Mar Reading & Release Celebration for Water Guest
Join us in welcoming poet Caroline M. Mar, who will be reading and signing her newest poetry collection, Water Guest, releasing through University of Wisconsin Press. Joining Mar in conversation are fellow writers Adrienne Perry, Somayeh Shams, and Eleanor Wilner. Read more about Water Guest below!
The conversation will be held @7PM in the upstairs Reading Room here at Big Blue Marble Bookstore.
Lake Tahoe: home of the Washoe Tribe, a shining blue jewel that crowns the Sierra Nevada, and a beloved American vacation destination made accessible by the transcontinental railroad built largely by Chinese laborers. This gorgeous location forms the site from which Caroline M. Mar’s stunning collection, Water Guest, seeks to reconcile issues of identity, ownership, and place. Mar’s attempts to locate herself geographically, genealogically, and etymologically echo throughout the poems. A direct ancestor was a railroad laborer; is that why her love for the land feels older than herself? Or is it the siren call of the deep, clear water?
Raising questions of inheritance, the conundrum of land ownership, and the violence of history, Mar gives voice to the lost writing of Chinese laborers and silent communion to those of us still here—immigrant and Indigenous, settler and resister. This engaging collection finds acceptance, if not resolution, through the questions themselves.
Caroline M. Mar is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Special Education and the chapbook Dream of the Lake. A high school health educator in her hometown of San Francisco, she is getting to know her new home of Oakland. A member of Rabble Collective, she has been granted residencies at Storyknife, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook, among others.
Adrienne Perry grew up in Wyoming, earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. From 2014-2016 she served as the Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. A Hedgebrook alumna, Adrienne is also a Kimbilio Fellow and a member of the Rabble Collective. Adrienne's writing has received support from Friends of Writers, the Elizabeth George Foundation, Inprint, and the University of Houston. In 2020, Adrienne received the inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Prize in Creative Writing from Meridians journal. Adrienne’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of literature and creative writing at at Villanova University.
Somayeh Shams is an Iranian-born writer and Engineer with an MFA degree in fiction from Warren Wilson College. She has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook and a recipient of a merit scholarship at the New York Summer Writers Institute. An excerpt of the novel she is currently finishing has appeared in Waxwing. She is the prose editor and a regular contributor for Nimrod International Journal.
Eleanor Wilner was born in Cleveland on July 29, 1937, and holds an interdepartmental PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
Wilner has published nine collections of poetry, including Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (Princeton University Press, 2019); Tourist in Hell (University of Chicago Press, 2010); The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon Press, 2004); Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998); Otherwise (University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Sarah’s Choice (University of Chicago Press, 1989).
