Writers' Workshop alumni Karla Kelsey and Rebecca Lehmann will read from their latest books of poetry.

Poet Karla Kelsey will read from her newest book, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy. Described as a "lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882–1966)" (karlakelsey.com), Transcendental Factory is praised by writer Danielle Dutton as "a brilliant novel from inside and outside Mina Loy—a novel that is also a poem, a dictionary, a historical compendium, an elegant archival encounter." Meanwhile, Yasna Bozhkova, author of Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries, describes Transcendental Factory as "part chronicle of Loy’s life, part scholarly diary," and "it explores how the experience of being immersed in Loy’s archive unleashes an experience of becoming, shaped by the desire to reach for the tantalizing past of the modernist era."

Karla Kelsey is the author of seven books, most recently the poetry collection On Certainty (Omnidawn, 2023) and the experimental biography Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions, 2024). She is the editor of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy (Yale University Press, 2024) and with Aaron McCollough co-publishes SplitLevel Texts, a small press of innovative poetry and hybrid-genre writing.

Rebecca Lehmann will read from her newest poetry collection, The Sweating Sickness. The University of Pittsburgh Press, which published The Sweating Sickness, describes it as a collection of "wide-ranging topics—the suicide of an abusive ex, parenting young children, fairy tales, reproductive rights, domestic violence, ghost stories, ancient myth—all set to the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Both personal and political, these poems interrogate how we grieve, what it means to be a woman in post-Roe America, and how private and public ghosts can come back to haunt us" (upittpress.org). Oliver de la Paz, author of The Diaspora Sonnets, praises The Sweating Sickness as a collection of "remarkable interlocking villanelle suites and meditations on mythology and Anne Boleyn [that] turn and churn in an acrobatic and exquisite display," while Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems, says of The Sweating Sickness: "Rebecca Lehmann’s painstakingly unswerving vision welds together gray Midwestern autumn and searing Orphic underworld. Winking out from below—intershot with grit and fancy, anger and awe—glint hidden contrapuntals, interlinked villanelles, reconnections, exultations. This is a book of chaotic love. You can dive into it anywhere. Count on its rich waters to hold you through your explorations."

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections The Sweating Sickness, Ringer, and Between the Crackups. Her writing has been featured in the American Poetry Review, the Threepenny Review, NPR's the Slowdown, and other venues. Originally from Door County, Wisconsin, Lehmann teaches creative writing at Saint Mary's College in Indiana. She is an alum of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

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Readings at Prairie Lights are sponsored by the Writing University.}