Cecily Parks in conversation with Louisa Hall - The Seeds

Name: Cecily Parks in conversation with Louisa Hall - The Seeds
Start: 2026-03-25T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240

Schedule

Wed, 25 Mar, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240 | Iowa City, IA

Cecily Parks will read from her new poetry collection, The Seeds, and will be joined in conversation by University of Iowa Associate Professor Louisa Hall. Longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, The Seeds is described by Publishers Weekly as "Women and the natural world take center stage in these precise and visionary poems...The collection interrogates interiority, motherhood, and the choices of famous female figures...Parks memorably evokes the textures and intricacies of life on earth." This collection is praised by Craig Morgan Teicher of NPR as "poems [that] are dark, lavish, far-reaching and subtly layered, making a harsh and rich mirror of the pastoral and the domestic," while Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next: Collected & New Poems, says: "The exquisite earthen poems of Cecily Parks in The Seeds help us feel more embodied, tethered to the earth, our lives, deep time, the nubby fragrances of mystery. Magnificently delicate and wildly strong all at once, these poems are perfect precision of living and seeing, shaped into lines. Mother Being, Human Being, Cosmic Haunted Being, all beings layering, inviting greater presence—The Seeds is a triumph."
Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections Field Folly Snow and O'Nights and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry 2022. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin.
Louisa Hall is Director of the English and Creative Writing Major at the University of Iowa and has published the novels Reproduction, Trinity, and Speak. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic and The Southwest Review, and other journals, and her essays have appeared in The New York Times, LARB, Slate, The MIT Technology Review, and Texas Monthly.