LAUREN HALDEMAN AND KAVEH AKBAR

Please join with Lauren Haldeman who will talk about and show images from her book Team Photograph. She will be joined in conversation by Kaveh Akbar. In her extraordinary graphic novel–which masterfully incorporates poetry and elements of memoir–Lauren Haldeman layers the warfare of soccer over the battlefields now called Bull Run Regional Park, where, growing up, her soccer team would practice and compete. The narrator turns to poetry and history to make sense of the town and its bloodshed, of its forever attachment to injustice and its inability to restore erased identities.

Lauren Haldeman is the author of the graphic novel Team Photograph, and the collections Instead of Dying (winner of the 2017 Colorado Prize for Poetry), Calenday, and The Eccentricity is Zero. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Fence and others. A graphic novelist and poet, she’s received an Iowa Arts Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and visiting fellowships from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and University of Cape Town.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of the poetry collections: Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, and he is the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. His honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize. He teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.