Something Small of How to See a River: Water Poetics with Friends
Join writers Mita Mahato, JasminĂ© Smith, Molly OlguĂn, and Teresa Dzieglewicz for a braided and collective reading. We'll welcome Teresa's new book, Something Small of How to See a River, by joining in community to explore and honor the many relationships that water holds.Â
Event Schedule:
7:00 Steve Tamayo opens with a Lakhota prayer and a few words on waterÂ
7:10 Introductions/welcome
7:20 First question/promptÂ
7:20-7:35 Each writer reads in response
7:35 Second promptÂ
7:35-7:50 Each writer reads in responseÂ
7:50 Third prompt
7:50-8:05 Each reader reads in responseÂ
8:05-8:15 Teresa reads a few more rivery poems
8:15-8:35 Q and AÂ
8:35 ReceptionÂ
Molly OlguĂn
Molly OlguĂn is a queer writer and educator based in Seattle. She holds a BA in English from Williams College and an MFA in Fiction from The Ohio State University. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students. Her collection The Sea Gives Up The Dead is the winner of the 2023 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, and is out now with Red Hen Press. Her short stories have appeared in Orange & Bee, Paranoid Tree, Redivider, The Normal School, River Styx, Quarterly West, and others. She is a 2025 Jack Hazard Fellow, and was a recipient of the Loft Mentor Series fellowship in 2019. She was awarded the 2015 AWP Intro Awards Prize in Fiction for her short story “Seven Deaths.” With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the queer sci fi audio drama “The Pasithea Powder.”Â
Jasminé Elizabeth Smith
JasminĂ©Â Elizabeth Smith is an Oklahoma poet, educator, and facilitator now residing in Seattle, Washington. She is a Cave Canem and Black Earth Institute fellow and a recipient of the 2025 National Endowment of the Arts in Poetry. Her poetic work interrogates the archives of the African Diaspora in various historical contexts and eras and finds the critical linkages between the past and present. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in publications such as Poetry, World Literature Today, and This is the Honey: A Contemporary Poetry Anthology of Black Poetry, among others. Her debut collection, South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2020), was the winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize.Â
Teresa Dzieglewicz
Teresa Dzieglewicz is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, educator, and lover of rivers and prairies. She is a fellow with Black Earth Institute, a Poet-in-Residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, and part of the founding team of Mni Wichoni Nakicizin Wounspe (Defenders of the Water School). With Natasha Mijares, she organizes "Watershed: Ways of Seeing the Chicago River". Her first book of poetry, Something Small of How to See a River was selected by Tyehimba Jess for the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press). Her first children's book, Belonging, co-written with Kimimila Locke, is forthcoming from Chronicle Books. She has won a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, the Gingko Prize, the Auburn Witness Prize, and the Palette Poetry Prize and has received fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, Community of Writers at Tahoe, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and Brooklyn Poets. Teresa lives with her family in Chicago, on Potawatomi land.Â
Mita Mahato
Mita Mahato is a comix artist and poet whose work joins fragments of used and discarded materials in poetic experiments that dramatize ecosystemic survival against capitalism. Her books are Arctic Play (The 3rd Thing 2024) and In Between (Pleiades 2017), and her poetry comix have appeared in places including PRISM, Ecotone, Shenandoah, Iterant, ANMLY, and Drunken Boat. Her work has been supported by San Francisco Center for the Book, Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity (HIFMB), Loghaven, Storyknife, Black Earth Institute, Mineral School, and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
