In-Person: Poetry Reading with Sally Wen Mao & Natalie Eilbert

Please join us for an in-person poetry reading to celebrate the release of THE KINGDOM OF SURFACES by Sally Wen Mao and OVERLAND by Natalie Eilbert!

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Natalie Eilbert's anticipated third collection, Overland, invokes elegy and psalm to speak to assault on the bodies of women and our planet. In a collection that is part warning, part rumination, Eilbert snapshots violence -- the scorch marks on California lumber, the discarded tools used to arrest climate change activists, the crescent moons on skin photographed by a forensic nurse. A chronicling of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and death cycles of the Great Barrier Reef, Overland maps an industry-scarred landscape that travels from coast to coast only to pause on the Congress floor where we are made to recognize: "Disappearance is active loss." Whether collective or private, environmental or familial, in Overland no loss is overlooked as sestinas and sonnets are interspersed with weary reportage on the power and limits of witness.

Sally Wen Mao is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection The Kingdom of Surfaces (Graywolf Press, 2023), and the debut fiction collection Ninetails (Penguin Books). She is also the author of two previous poetry collections, Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Mad Honey Symposium(Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she was recently a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.

Natalie Eilbert is the author of Overland (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), her third poetry collection. A poet and journalist, Eilbert has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. Poems from Overland have been published in The New Yorker, POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her articles and essays have been published in Green Bay Press-Gazette, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, USA Today, Better Government Association, The Rumpus, Granta, The Lifted Brow and elsewhere. Born and raised in New York, she lives in Wisconsin as the statewide mental health reporter for USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.

Accessibility: This event will be at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Face masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. For ASL Interpretation to be made available, please submit a request by emailing events@womenandchildrenfirst.com. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.