Event Type
This reading panel, featuring poets Paula Cisewski, Danika Stegeman, Angie Mazakis, and Darius Atefat-Peckham, formed around the idea of the "Ancestress," as illuminated in the Bjork song of the same name from her 2022 album Fossora. The idea of the ancestress explores the ways we evolve from and carry our mothers as well as broader ideas of birth, mothering, and the feminine forward in time. Our mothers survive pain and violence while also creating life and/or healing in the face of those things. The readers come from diverse backgrounds and will share poems inspired by our mothers that capture the complexity, terror, and grace of their unique experiences. As Bjork intones "You see with your own eyes / But hear with your mother's." Three of the panelists lost their mothers in 2020; the other experienced the near loss of their mother. Each of us carry our mother forward in time through our survival and our words. To echo Bjork, "We are her hopekeepers / we assure hope is there at, at all times."
