The Spiral Bookcase Announces Upcoming Virtual Event with Award-Winning Poet & Best-Selling Author Katerina Canyon

The Spiral Bookcase announced today they will be hosting a virtual event featuring Award-Winning Poet and Best-Selling Author Katerina Canyon on January 14th, 2022 at 4PM PST / 7PM EST. Katerina Canyon will be reading from her latest poetry collection Surviving Home. The event is free and open to the public.

Concisely arresting and challenging the beliefs of family and the fantasies of tradition, the poems in Surviving Home show that home is a place that you endure rather than a place where you are nurtured. With unyielding cadence and unparalleled sadness and warmth, Katerina Canyon contemplates the prejudice and limitations buried in a person's African American heritage: parents that seem to care for you with one hand and slap you with the other, the secret desires to be released from the daily burdens of life, as well as the surprising ways a child chooses to amuse herself. Finding resilience in the unexpected, this collection tears down the delicate facades of family.

Katerina Canyon’s poems offer intimate accounts of home as the locus of danger — and homeland as a state of oppression. They are at once urgent and mysterious, full of ocean depths and surging currents. Far from nostalgia, home inspires in this poet a vigilance, keeping watch on herself and others. Her very language is charged with the alert intelligence that offers a means of survival, and metaphors that transform pain into poetry. —Devin Johnston, author of Mosses and Lichens

Katerina Canyon’s poems dive into history unafraid to explore the complexity of home and family and acknowledge: the sea is filled with bones. This powerful, engaging collection where we see the billowing skirt of sunset asks again and again: How do get past our pasts? Smart, poignant, compassionate, Canyon’s poems remind us that strength happens despite one’s childhood and one’s country; they exclaim, We can choose whether we are stuck / In darkness or in light. —Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides

In lush language and startling images, Katerina Canyon unveils a story in blood and bone of a speaker who survives domestic cycles of addiction and abuse, terrors handed down from the plantation through generations of her kin . . . Like the Phoenix, the speaker dares to draw near destruction to name our violent histories in order to claim a survivor’s eternal understanding of how to love, how to mother, and how to teach the world that We cannot be bound. We are free. We are infinite. —Katy Didden, author of The Glacier’s Wake

Katerina Canyon is a 2020 and 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Folks.

Her first book Changing the Lines was released in August 2017. This work is a conversation between mother and daughter as they examine what it means to operate within the world as black women.

From 2000 to 2003, Katerina Canyon served as the Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga. During that time, she started a poetry festival and ran several poetry readings.

She has a B.A. in English, International Studies and Creative Writing from Saint Louis University and a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Her latest book Surviving Home was released on November 9, 2021, published by Kelsay Books.

To learn more about Katerina Canyon, go to https://www.poetickat.com/The event at the Spiral Bookcase will be held virtually via Zoom. To learn more, go to https://spiralbookcase.com/pages/events