Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller: Taxidermy Mermaids, the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, and other Marvels

Poets Kathryn Nuernberger and Maya Jewell Zeller will share the stage and read from their most recent collections.

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Nuernberger’s collection, The End of Pink (BOA Editions) is populated by strange characters—Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin—all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and—of course—joy.

Zeller’s latest collection, Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press), navigates pregnancy, birth, postpartum depression, and lineage through the speaker’s nuanced relationships with family and the natural world. The speaker questions what it means to be born to a place versus naturalized, suggesting she can’t even compare herself to somewhat useful invasive plant species; in the title poem, Zeller asks, “what do I have / for the bees?”

This event is free and open to the public. The bar will be open.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of Rag & Bone, which won the 2010 Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press. She has received research grants from the American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life.

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press) and Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental forest, Maya edits fiction for Crab Creek Review and teaches creative writing at Central Washington University. She lives in Spokane with her husband and two children.