Nonfiction Writing Program graduate Mieke Eerkens will read from All Ships Follow Me: A Family Memoir.  "The confluence of conflicting war traumas fuels the emotional heart of Mieke Eerkens' insightful narrative. All Ships Follow Me is an excavation of the scars of war drawn from personal interviews, archival documents, and immersion in the physical and psychic spaces of the past. It is also an imaginative quest to understand how trauma influences generations, sometimes directly through behavioral quirks and aberrations but also through a vulnerability to sadness and the illusion of home."—Patricia Foster

Eerkens’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Creative Nonfiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Guernica. She earned an M.A. in English from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Eerkens teaches creative writing online for UCLA Extension's Writers' Program and as a visiting instructor for the Iowa Summer Writing Program. She divides her time between Amsterdam and California.