Booksmith hosts Ananda Lima for her new book of poems, Mother/Land, a virtual reading featuring Omotara James, Susan Nguyen & Alina Stefanescu. Join us!

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order the authors' books below and we'll ship them directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop):

• Mother/Land by Ananda Lima
• Dear Diaspora by Susan Nguyen
• Dor by Alina Stefanescu
• Song of My Softening by Omotara James (pre-order, out 4/12/22)

We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to contact [email protected].

About Mother/Land by Ananda Lima

Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker’s relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.

About the authors

Omotara James is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and editor. She is the author of the poetry collection, Song of My Softening, forthcoming from Alice James Books, April 2022 and the chapbook, “Daughter Tongue,” selected by African Poetry Book Fund, in collaboration with Akashic Books, for the 2018 New Generation African Poets Box Set.

Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in Arizona. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of "three women poets to watch." Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. She writes a lot about identity, the body, and the Vietnamese diaspora and also likes to make zines. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2021. Visit her at www.susanpoet.com

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020). Her poetry collection, dor, won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Alina's writing can be found (or is forthcoming) in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. She is currently working on a novel-like creature. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.

Ananda Lima’s poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) is the winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks (Amblyopia, Bull City Press, 2020 and Translation, Paper Nautilus, 2019), a fiction chapbook (Tropicália, Newfound, 2021), and a poetry and photography chapbook (Vigil, Get Fresh Books, 2021). Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.