Poetry Night with Jolene Brink, Krissy Kludt, and Anna Zumbahlen
About this Event
On the surface of a mine, overburden is excess landscape — soil, stone, roots—pushed aside for the more desirable materials beneath. Across four sweeping sections, Overburden asks what we disturb in our relentless digging, whether naming the stars, mining the past, or giving birth in an uncertain century. From clear-cuts to pandemic nurseries, it gathers the personal and the historical into a layered archive of presence and loss where the excess of overburden becomes a luminous site of wonder, grief, and reckoning.
Jolene was born and raised in northern Minnesota. She received the Merriam-Frontier Award for her chapbook, Peregrine, and the Walt McDonald First-Book Series in Poetry award for her poetry collection, Overburden. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Orion, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She works for the University of Minnesota and lives with her family in a historic blue house near the St. Croix River.
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Set among the oak-dotted hills and granite heights of northern California, I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little distills moments of communion with the natural world into spare, lilting language. The poems traverse ordinary days and periods of loss; they are elegy and wish. They examine motherhood and daughterhood and turn to the living land as source of solace and nurturing. Each poem reaches for reverent wakefulness, “to attend / to know how shadows move as sun shifts / to notice every fiddlehead who rises, startling.”
Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and executive director of Writing the Wild. Her debut poetry collection I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little released in March 2026 from Green Writers Press. Her work appears in anthologies The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025), Taking Liberties (Cutthroat 2025), and Stories from the Trail (Wayfarer Books 2024), and in other publications, including Terrain.org, The Wildness We Tend, and Humana Obscura. She lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.
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Anna Zumbahlen's debut collection Surety traverses memory while attending to the landscape of northwestern Iowa during a year that brought ecopolitical tensions to the surface of daily life in a small town. These poems open the state of mind that produces lyric poetry onto questions of solitude, selfhood, place, and community in a record of generosities, violences, and contradictions. Set in acres planted with corn and soy, lined by roadsides overgrown with thistles and prairie rose, Surety maps intercounty disputes over pollution in the watershed, catalogues seasonal shifts and flora both cultivated and wild, and probes a private loss. This collection locates surety in poetry itself, and in what poetry makes legible in life and love.
Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Southern California. She holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. Read recent work at www.annazum.com.
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