Author Event! Angela Pelster's The Evolution of Fire!
About this Event
Join us on July 31st as we host Angela Pelster, who will be discussing her latest essay collection, The Evolution of Fire: Essays on Crisis and Becoming. Signed copies of the book will be available during the event for purchase.
Moderator TBA
About the book:
A Katie Couric Media Summer Reading Selection
”The Evolution of Fire is stunningly written—vivid in imagery, in the braiding together of language, and in the honoring of every person it shines a light on.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year
Crisis is an agent of evolution, and Angela Pelster knows what it means to evolve. As a child, she burned grass to keep weeds at bay and watched tadpoles transform. She basked in the warmth of her father’s love but was burned by his rage, and she witnessed a sudden, unnamable change occur in her older sister after an encounter with a stranger in a white van. In adulthood, she survived the explosion of her marriage, the destruction of her burning home, and a year spent as the single mother of a toddler without a home of their own. And like us all, she has weathered the upheaval of our current atmosphere—political instability, climate change, mass extinction.
But in spite of the world’s violence, Pelster manages to remain open to its beauty, deciding not to resist change, but to give herself over to it and let evolution make her into a new animal. She plumbs the depths of ancestral knowledge to uncover the scale of our ancient capacity for adaptation, from humankind’s early harnessing of fire to the grandmothers responsible for our continued existence.
Meditative and curious, pulsing with fascination, fear, and the untamable human spirit, The Evolution of Fire contemplates who we are now and what we still might become.
About the author:
Angela Pelster’s new essay collection is forthcoming with Milkweed Editions in April 2026. Her first essay collection, , won the Great Lakes Colleges Association award and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel award for the Art of the Essay. Her children’s book, The Curious Adventures of India Sophia, won the Golden Eagle Children’s Choice Award. Her essays have previously appeared in Agni, Orion, LitHub, Ploughshares, Tin House, Granta, and The Kenyon Review, among others. She received her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and she’s been a McKnight fellow, a Bread Loaf fellow, and a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee. She’s the Director of the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University and is the founder and director of Writers Go to the Movies.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00 to USD 23.18
