Join us for a very special evening of readings and discussion with Miranda Beeson and Claudia Acevedo- Quinones on Tuesday November 28th from 7-8:00pm via zoom. To register to get the zoom link: REGISTER
About the books:
Wildlife: In Wildlife, Miranda Beeson sinks her observational teeth into the living world-shape-shifting, role-playing, tracking the behavior of creatures —both homo sapiens and other species who inhabit our planet. What is our social contract with one another? With the planet we live on? Who will appropriate who or what? In Wildlife, beasts of al kinds (radioactive and more stalk the "civilized" world.
The Hurricane Book: In this powerful debut, Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, bits and pieces of overheard conversations, and fragmented anecdotes. Organized around six hurricanes that passed through the island with varying degrees of intensity between 1928 and 2017, The Hurricane Book documents the myriad ways in which colonialism particularly the relationship between the United States and the island has seeped into the lives of Puerto Ricans, affecting how they and their land recover from catastrophe, as well as how families and citizens are bound to one another.
Moving seamlessly from the personal, to the political, to the environmental, and back again, Acevedo-Quiñones takes the reader through her own experience of family dynamics, mental illness, and substance abuse and their long-reaching echoes al against the backdrop of Puerto Ricos struggles and beauty. Through stories and poems of relatives, folklore, and necessary escape, she illuminates both the tenderness and heartbreak of relationships with relatives and homeland. An attempt at a colony's etymology in a time when it is perpetually embattled by natural disasters, crippling debt, and the mass exodus of its people, The Hurricane Book is also an invitation to se the realities that many don't want to see- a refusal to stay in the dark about our- selves or our collective history.
About the authors:
Miranda Beeson's poems appear all over, including Barrow Street, The Southampton Review, Great Weather For Media, Typishly, & Melville House's Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets. She is the author of the chapbooks Ode to the Unexpected from novelist Peter Cameron's Shrinking Violet Press & The Jones of It, a recent finalist for the Tomaz Salamun Prize. Along the way, she's been the recipient of Palette Poetry's Spotlight Award & a Jody Donohue Poetry Prize. An ardent advocate for Arts in Education, NYSCA has supported her creative writing programs in school systems (K-12). More recently, she has been teaching creative writing & literature at Stony Brook University. She collaborates with artist & designer Nadira Vlaun on limited editions of her prose & poetry-including to date, Salt Meadow & Volatile Activity. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton & lives on the North Fork of Long Island & in New York City. mirandabeeson.com
Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones is a writer from Puerto Rico whose poems and short fiction have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, wildness, Ambit Magazine, Radar Poetry, and other publications. In 2019, she received an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University, where she also taught poetry to undergraduate students. Her chapbook, Bedroom Pop, was published by dancing girl press in 2021. In 2022, she was awarded a Letras Boricuas Fellowship by the Flamboyán Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation. Claudia lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Quotes about Wildfire:
"Beeson's voice is as effortless as old money and as keen as a fish knife. Reader, you'll be gutted, in the best possible way."
Julie Sheehan, author of Bar Book and Orient Point
"Even if you've never met Beeson (which is tragic), you can hear her voice radiate off the page in this stunning collection of poems."
Matt Coonan, author of Toy Gun
"Her sonnets are gorgeous, little machines full of life and its contradictions; they are some of the finest sonnets anywhere."
M. G. Stephens, author of King Ezra and The Brooklyn Book of the Dead
"There is a vigorous restlessness to Wildlife. The turning of the page is a drama."
Lynn Emanuel
Kaleidoscopic and zesty Wildlife abounds in Beeson's piercingly observed inconsistencies, whether the poet encounters a Home Depot or a man without a home."
Molly Peacock, author of A Friend Sails in on a Poem
