Emily August Poetry Reading

Lake Superior Writers hosts a reading of Emily August’s first published book of poetry, The Punishments Must Be a School.

Emily is an Associate Professor of Literature at Stockton University. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She divides her time between Duluth and Lake Superior’s North Shore and the Atlantic Ocean’s Jersey Shore.

Here’s what Barnes & Noble has to say about Emily’s book. “This debut collection explores what it means to be biracial in America, and asks why our culture demands that violence pervade its every model and moment of growth,” says Jeanne Dubrow. “The speakers of these poems receive lessons in cruelty, tutorials in deracination, bodies split from themselves and from the green world of pine trees and meadows. These brilliant lyric poems reclaim, revise, and rewrite the old stories so that the next generation might receive a new narrative.”

The reading is part of Lake Superior Writers’ Book Group for Writers Series, which is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.