Welcome Katerina Canyon as she discusses her poetry collection Surviving Home with guest Brionna Bennett!
About Surviving Home:
Concisely arresting and challenging the beliefs of family and the fantasies of tradition, the poems in Surviving Home show that home is a place that you endure rather than a place where you are nurtured. With unyielding cadence and unparalleled sadness and warmth, Katerina Canyon contemplates the prejudice and limitations buried in a person’s African American heritage: parents that seem to care for you with one hand and slap you with the other, the secret desires to be released from the daily burdens of life, as well as the surprising ways a child chooses to amuse herself. Finding resilience in the unexpected, this collection tears down the delicate facades of family.
***
Katerina Canyon is a 2020 and 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her stories have been published in New York Times and Huffington Post. From 2000 to 2003, she served as the Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga. During that time, she started a poetry festival and ran several poetry readings.
She was featured in the Los Angeles Times and was awarded the Montesi Award from Saint Louis University in 2011, 2012, and 2013. She has published multiple chapbooks and an album.
Brionna Bennett is an African American writer born and raised in rural Virginia with a love for magic, fairies, and nature. She is the organizer of DC Creative Writing Read & Critique and a DC Writer’s Salon member. When Brionna is not writing, she is a Middle school special educator helping students with similar disabilities she struggled with growing up. She loves all things Disney, superheroes, and music.
While getting her BA in Psychology, Bennett studied Creative Writing in Ireland. The country’s magic helps her to create the #blackgirlmagic stories she wanted as a kid. She started working on her novel Beauty is The Beast after her poem by the same name was stolen by a former roommate. Today she is still inspired by the note left by the former roommate, “I need this more than you do.”
***
This event will be hosted in-person at Lost City Books! Masks and temperature checks will be required of attendees.
Accessibility note: This event will be held up two fight of stairs. Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!
Surviving Home will be available at Lost City Books!