Author Event with Weston Morrow, Elissa Washuta & Chris Vanjonack
About this Event
Join us for an evening with Weston Morrow with readings from Elissa Washuta & Chris Vanjonack in celebration of Morrow's new poetry collection, Cloud Builder.
6:30pm on Thursday, September 3 at Prologue Bookshop
About Cloud Builder: What do we owe the dead? And what do we–who will soon be dead–owe the living?
What do we owe the dead? This is the question at the heart of Cloud Builder, in which Weston Morrow interrogates the burden of legacy and the ever-watchful gaze of our deceased loved ones. His search takes him from the landscapes of the late Romantics to the soccer fields and baseball diamonds of present-day Washington State, along the way reanimating figures from his own and our collective past.
These poems reawaken long-dead painters and musicians, collapsed bridges, derelict ferries, and dormant volcanoes, confronting him with his failure, at times, to ask what it is we owe the living. What do the dead want from us? Or, conversely, is it we who haunt “the past, who can’t stop turning back / for one last look”?
WESTON MORROW is the author of Cloud Builder, winner of the 2025 National Poetry Series, forthcoming from University of Georgia Press on Sept. 1, 2026. His recent poetry has appeared in Boulevard, The Adroit Journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an M.A. in English Literature from Central Washington University. A former print journalist, he teaches writing at The Ohio State University.
ELISSA WASHUTA is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the author of White Magic, Starvation Mode, and My Body Is a Book of Rules. With Theresa Warburton, she co-edited the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. Elissa is an associate professor at the Ohio State University, where she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her next book, The Big Score, is an experimental business memoir about money, videogames, and sickness, forthcoming from Washington Square Press.
CHRIS VANJONAK is a writer and educator from Denver, Colorado. A recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, his fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in One Story, The Book of the Month Club’s Volume 0, Barrelhouse, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. His debut short story collection, Out of Body, is forthcoming in September.
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