Environmental poet and UVA alum H.G. Dierdorff will read from her debut poetry collection at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville on Jan. 24 at 7 p.m.
Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss.
Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both. A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.
Dierdorff was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and published by the University of Nevada Press. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International and Willow Springs.
A conversation with author Erika Howsare will follow.
Howsare is the author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with Our Wild Neighbors, a nonfiction book that examines the relationship between humans and deer. She has also published two books of poetry. She lives in central Virginia, where she teaches writing privately and contributes reviews and essays to national outlets including The Atlantic, Orion and Los Angeles Review of Books.
This in-person event is free to attend and open to the public.
New Dominion Bookshop is located at 404 E Main St. on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.
For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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Crystal Graham
