Join us for an evening with poet and novelist Terese Svoboda, who will share work from her story collection Great American Desert, the fourth book she has published in four years. She will also discuss her biography of poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You.

Water, its use and abuse, trickles through Great American Desert, a story collection by Terese Svoboda that spans the misadventures of the prehistoric Clovis people to the wanderings of a forlorn couple around a pink pyramid in a sci-fi prairie. In “Dutch Joe,” the eponymous hero sees the future from the bottom of a well in the Sandhills, while a woman tries to drag her sister back from insanity in “Dirty Thirties.” In “Bomb Jockey,” a local Romeo disposes of leaky bombs at South Dakota’s army depot. A family quarrels in “Ogallala Aquifer” as a thousand trucks dump chemical waste next to their land. Bugs and drugs are devoured in “Alfalfa,” a disc jockey talks her way out of a knifing in “Sally Rides,” and an updated Pied Piper begs parents to reconsider in “The Mountain.” The consequences of the land’s mistreatment is epitomized in the final story by a discovery inside a pink pyramid. In her arresting and inimitable style, Svoboda’s delicate handling of the complex dynamics of family and self seeps into every sentence of these first-rate short stories about what we do to the world around us—and what it can do to us.

Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic, and videomaker. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, six novels, a novella and stories, a memoir, a biography and a book of translation from the Nuer. Her most recent works include When The Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems (Anhinga Press), Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet (Schaffner Press), and Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship (Eyewear). Her essays, reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, Poetry, Times Literary Supplement, Yale Review, Slate, and the New York Times. She has won a Guggenehim, the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is a three-time winner of the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Yaddo, McDowell, and Bellagio residencies. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.’s Disney Hall in 2005.