Enjoy Poetry Readings by Kate Bolton Bonnici and Laura Reece Hogan
On Tuesday, January 30, 2024, at 10 AM at the Payson Library in the Surfboard Room, Pepperdine Libraries is hosting readings featuring two authors of recently-published poetry books.
Kate Bolton Bonnici, assistant professor of English at Pepperdine University, grew up in rural Alabama, and holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, the University of California, Riverside, and UCLA. Her debut collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her newest book, A True & Just Record, invites readers to the three-way crossroads of poetry, feminist rhetorics, and early modern studies. Bonnici weaves together archival materials from the English witch trials, 20th century poets and philosophers, and her own family. With fury and care, haunted by absences, these poems - all also forms of experimental scholarship - interrogate, disrupt, and play.
Laura Reece Hogan holds a Master of Arts in theology from St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California. She is a Lay Carmelite, an attorney, a poet, and author of I Live, No Longer I, O Garden-Dweller, and Litany of Flights. Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, her latest work, Butterfly Nebula, reaches from the depths of the sea to the edges of space to chart intersections of the physical universe, the divine, the human, and the constantly unfolding experience of being “one thing in the act of becoming another.” This collection of poems teems with creatures and cosmic phenomena that vivify and reveal our common struggle toward faith and identity. The longing and metamorphosis of the human heart and soul are reimagined in an otherworldly landscape of firework jellyfish, sea slug, stingray, praying mantis, butterfly and moth, moon and star, and celestial events ranging from dark matter and Kepler’s Supernova remnant to a dozen classified nebulae. Our desire for purpose and renewal collides with the vast constellation of divine possibility in this collection, which invites the reader to enter a transformative world both deeply interior and embracing of the far-flung cosmos.
The event is free.