A Catalog of Future Mercies by Serena Chopra
About this Event
Please join us on Thursday, September 17th to celebrate the poetry collection by Serena Chopra. The author will be joined by Aditi Machado and Divya Victor.
In ghost stories and family history, this lyrical memoir explores mercy as resistance to generational violence.
In this luminous memoir-in-poems, Serena Chopra explores the complexities of mercy in an immigrant family haunted by generational violence. Drawing connections between the brutalized prairie beneath suburban lawns and the brutalized body seeking reclamation through sensuality, Chopra examines what it means to be a survivor descended from both survivors and perpetrators. Through divinatory poetics and cross-temporal storytelling, she parallels national histories of violence with the paradox of caretaking for a parent who has been both victim and abuser. And, in the specters of generational violence, Chopra invokes an imperative to stay present with lineages of trauma rather than slip into personal and cultural amnesia. A lyric woven in four parts, A Catalog of Future Mercies reimagines mercy as radical embodied witnessing, a form of resilience that refuses the tyranny of forgetting.
Serena Chopra is a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and performance artist. She is a recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, a RedLine Artist In-Residence and a Fulbright Scholar. A Catalog of Future Mercies (Graywolf Press, 2026) is her third book.
Aditi Machado’s books include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness, Emporium, and Some Beheadings; as well as two book-length translations, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action). A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati.
Divya Victor (b. 1983) is a Tamil-American poet, essayist, and educator. She is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books), which won the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Divya is the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt), NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), and THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, W.W. Norton’s The Seagull Reader, and boundary2. Her next book, KIN, a collection of essays, received a 2025 Creative Capital Award and is due out from Graywolf in 2027. She is Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she directs the Creative Writing program.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which has a wheelchair accessible entrance and bathroom. Masks are required. We have free masks available for everyone at the door, several large air purifiers, and ceiling fans for circulation. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you need a reserved seat, ASL interpretation, or have other access needs, please email [email protected] (2 weeks notice is required for interpretation).
Where is it happening?
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