A Reading with Harriet Levin and Rebecca Entel

Join us for a reading and discussion with Harriet Levin, author of My Oceanography, and Rebecca Entel, author of Fingerprints of Previous Owners. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required.)

About My Oceanography: Levin plunges into psychic depths to confront desire, fear and loss. These poems expand borders as her language strives toward transcendence. The life and work of post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse serves as a starting point, yet these poems extend far beyond ekphrasis in their imaginative renderings of Hesse's life against the demands of her art. In exploring the persona's struggle to create art, Levin's poems engage the reader and connect us to the demands of work, marriage and the everyday.

About Harriet Levin: Prize winning poet and novelist Harriet Levin has been combining her writing with activism for over twenty years. The author of the newly released poetry book, My Oceanography, her two previous collections include The Christmas Show (chosen by Eavan Boland for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award) and Girl in Cap and Gown (a National Poetry Series Finalist). Her debut novel, How Fast Can You Run, a Novel Based on the Life of Lost Boy of Sudan Michael Majok Kuch was originally excerpted in The Kenyon Review and came out of a One Book, One Philadelphia writing project she founded with her family and students to help reunite several Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan with their mothers living abroad. She has written for The Forward, PEN America, The Smart Set, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. She holds a MFA from the University of Iowa and teaches creative writing and directs The Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing at Drexel University.

About Fingerprints of Previous Owners: At a Caribbean resort built atop a former slave plantation, Myrna works as a maid by day; by night she trespasses on the resort's overgrown inland property, secretly excavating the plantation ruins. Rapt by the crumbling walls of the once slave-owner's estate, she explores the unspoken history of the plantation— a site where her ancestors once worked the land, but which the resort now uses as a lookout point for tourists. Suffused with the sun-drenched beauty of the Caribbean, Fingerprints of Previous Owners is a powerful novel of hope and recovery in the wake of devastating trauma. In her soulful and timely debut, Entel explores what it means to colonize and be colonized, to trespass and be trespassed upon, to be wounded and to heal.

About Rebecca Entel: Rebecca Entel’s short stories and essays have been published in such journals as Catapult, Guernica, Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Cleaver Magazine. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches multicultural American literature, Caribbean literature, creative writing, and the literature of social justice. She also teaches fiction workshops for Catapult and the Iowa Writers House. Fingerprints of Previous Owners is her first novel.