Please join us in celebrating the release of All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran! For this poetry reading and conversation, Paul will be joined by Alison C. Rollins. This event will take place on our Crowdcast channel. Please register below.

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ABOUT THE BOOK

Visceral and astonishing, Paul Tran’s debut poetry collection All the Flowers Kneeling investigates intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism in order to radically alter our understanding of freedom, power, and control. In poems of desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran’s poems elucidate the complex and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery, enhanced by innovative poetic forms that mirror the nonlinear emotional and psychological experiences of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling revels in rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, and ultimately becomes an essential testament to the human capacity for resilience, endurance, and love.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Paul Tran received their BA in history from Brown University and MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were the chancellor’s graduate fellow and senior poetry fellow. They have been awarded a 2021 Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Paul’s work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere.

Alison C. Rollins is currently an MFA candidate at Brown University. In 2019, she was named a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she was a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Rollins has been awarded support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a recipient of the 2018 Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award. A 2020 Pushcart Prize winner, her debut poetry collection Library of Small Catastrophes was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee.

Image Description: A dark grey banner with a leaf pattern background featuring two photographs of the authors: Paul Tran on top and Alison C. Rollins on bottom. Beside these photographs is the book cover image for All the Flowers Kneeling: the title of the book is written in black cursive font, and there’s a mustard yellow body shape with a swirl in the center.

Please note: Our virtual events are recorded and viewable anytime on Women & Children First’s Crowdcast Channel. The recordings are later uploaded with closed captioning to our YouTube Channel within a week or two of the event.

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Tags: Alison C. Rollins, Chicago, Edgewater, Paul Tran, Virtual Poetry Reading: Paul Tran with Alison C. Rollins, Women & Children First Bookstore