B R U N A presented the first event in the MUTTER COURAGE program, an occasional reading series + conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland.

For this very special inaugural event, three poets, recently landed in Bellingham, read from their work to celebrate the launch of ELY Shipley's latest project Some Animal, published by Nightboat Books, "a new cross-genre collection that engages historical and personal explorations of gender and self."

In support of this launch YANARA Friedland and JANE Wong also read from recent work.

ABOUT THE POETS

Besides Some Animal, ELY Shipley is the author of Boy with Flowers, winner of the Barrow Street Press book prize judged by Carl Phillips, the Thom Gunn Award, and finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; and On Beards: A Memoir of Passing, a letterpress chapbook from speCt! Books. His poems and cross-genre work also have appeared in literary publications including the Seneca Review, Western Humanities Review, and many others. He is currently Assistant Professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

YANARA Friedland is a German-American writer, translator, and teacher. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award. "Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak,"  a digital chapbook, is available from Essay Press. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts, supporting her current book project, Groundswell, a chorography of border regions in the German-Polish and Sonoran borderlands. She is the director of MyLife Tucson, a community archive, hosted by the Jewish History Museum in Tucson and teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. She is curator of the MUTTER COURAGE series at Bruna Press.

JANE Wong is the author of OVERPOUR, published by Action Books, and is the recipient of The American Poetry Review's 2016 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, The Volta, Third Coast, and in the anthologies Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.  

ABOUT MUTTER COURAGE

MUTTER COURAGE is an occasional reading series and conversation space curated by YANARA Friedland, which invites writers at the corner of poetic, embodied, and intersectional practices to share their work with the B R U N A community. MUTTER COURAGE refers to the name of the main character in Berthold Brecht’s eponymous play. A relentless maker in a war-torn world, MUTTER COURAGE inspires this series, which unfolds in expressions of courage in voice.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We acknowledge that the activities of Bruna Press + Archive take place on the sacred and ancestral home of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. We are grateful for their loving stewardship of the land and its inhabitants, and intend to be good guests and neighbors as we recognize their sovereignty and rich cultural practice + heritage. We set this intention first by making acknowledgments and then by practicing reciprocity. We are grateful to be able to share this space (both physically and culturally) with indigenous communities from here and elsewhere.