Join us Monday, November 4th, at 7PM for an evening of poetry to celebrate the release of Darius Atefat-Peckham's debut collection, BOOK OF KIN. Reading with Darius will be Tawanda Mulalu, author of PLEASE MAKE ME PRETTY, I DON'T WANT TO DIE.

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BOOK OF KIN follows a boy’s coming of age in the aftermath of a car accident that took the lives of both his mother and brother. Through these poems, Atefat-Peckham constructs a language for grief that is porous and revelatory, spoken assuredly across the imagination, bridging time and space, and creating a reciprocal haunting between the living and the dead.

Inspired by the Persian epic The Book of Kings, the Sufi mystic poetry of Rumi, and his mother’s poetry, these poems form a path of connection between the author and his Iranian heritage. Book of Kin interrogates what it means to exist between cultures, to be a survivor of tragedy, to practice love and joy toward one’s beloveds, and to hope for greater connection through poems that wade through time and memory “like so many fish spreading swimming in the green-blue.”

Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of the chapbook How Many Love Poems and editor of his mother Susan Atefat-Peckham’s posthumous collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poem-a-Day, Georgia Review, Indiana Review, The Journal, Rattle, and elsewhere and has been published in anthologies including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora. In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet and he is currently a poetry fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

Tawanda Mulalu was born in Gaborone, Botswana. His first book, Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die was selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and is listed as a best poetry book of 2022 by The Boston Globe, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Tawanda’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Lana Turner, Lolwe, The New England Review, The Paris Review, A Public Space and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by Brooklyn Poets, the Community of Writers, the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Tin House Books. Tawanda has also served as a Ledecky Fellow for Harvard Magazine and as the first Diversity and Inclusion Chair of The Harvard Advocate.