Join us for an evening with Miranda Mellis, who will read from her new novel, Crocosmia. A conversation with Brian Teare will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: A philosophical fable, Crocosmia centers on Maya as she recollects the “great turning”—a moment of radical social and ecological change effected in part by the art of her mother, Jane. As Maya recalls her upbringing—from a commune run by anarchist nuns to a time of rural isolation before her mother’s disappearance—Mellis’s prose gorgeously conjures a life defined by revolutionary thought and action and the interplay and tension between family life and political commitment. At once a fantasy, a handbook to political thought, and a work of ecofiction, this lush novel meditates on how, in a world on the precipice, dreams of communal care can bloom.
About the Author: Miranda Mellis is the author of the novel Crocosmia; three novellas, The Revisionist, The Spokes, and The Quarry; and a short story collection, None of This Is Real. Her poetry and nonfiction books and chapbooks include The Revolutionary, Demystifications, Unconsciousness Raising, and Materialisms. She is the coauthor of two book-length dialogues: The Instead with Emily Abendroth and Passing Through with Rick Moody. With Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz, she was a founding coeditor at The Encyclopedia Project. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, where she is a professor at The Evergreen State College. Read her intermittently here.
About the Moderator: A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize, and Poem Bitten by a Man, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. A selected essays, Textual Preference, will be out from Nightboat in 2027. A professor of poetry at the University of Virginia, Brian lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
