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...with Jennifer Eli Bowen, Zeke Caligiuri and Chris Cabrera

Join us as we welcome Jennifer Eli Bowen to the store for a coversation with Zeke Caligiuri and Chris Cabrera moderated by Ruby Djuna Haack in celebration of The Next of Kin, a remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails.

“What’s our obligation to each other?” asks Jennifer Eli Bowen in this propulsive exploration of community, solitude, and love. Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country’s largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library.

Tracing both connection and its lack, Bowen uncovers what happens when it’s missing, how we find it, and how it heals individuals, communities, and systems—from the incarcerated caretakers of newborn foals in Norway to the time-bending drama of watching children grow into adults. And through this winding quest to understand love, she moves readers out of their complacency not only about the state of American incarceration, but about what we owe ourselves and society.

Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that “harm is shared, and healing is too.”

Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, The Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, The Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. The founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she lives in St. Paul, a block in any direction from sidewalk poetry and snow.

Zeke Caligiuri (he/they) is a writer and activist from South Minneapolis. He is the author of This is Where I Am, published by University of Minnesota Press, a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. Caligiuri has won multiple awards through the PEN Prison Writing Contest and is the cofounder of the Stillwater Writers Collective, the first all-prisoner created and facilitated collective in the country.

He is a contributor to The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison as well as School, Not Jail: How Educators Can Disrupt School Pushout and Mass Incarceration. He is an editor and contributor to the recent anthology American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (Coffee House Press, 2023). Caligiuri’s fiction was anthologized in Prison Noir, edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

As an incarcerated writer, his work has been widely published in journals and anthologies for years. He is directly impacted by over two decades of incarceration and now does community outreach for the Minnesota Justice Research Center and is helping to build the Re-Enfranchised Coalition, empowering system-impacted people and reinvesting in the humanization of those still stuck within the captivity business.

C. Fausto Cabrera is a multi-genre artist whose poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Antioch Review, Water~Stone Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Washington Post Magazine, to name a few. His Inherited Scars series—transforming trauma into handmade paper art—has been shown at the Weisman Art Museum and the Cargill Gallery. Now stepping into photography, Cabrera defies boundaries of container or scope, weaving survival into every medium.

In prose, his collaboration with Alec Soth on The Parameters of Our Cage drew acclaim from The New Yorker and The Guardian, helping him earn the Haymarket Writing and Freedom Fellowship. Cabrera also contributes to social justice by writing alternative-to-prison programming for the Transformative Justice Alliance and working in the reentry field through Damascus Way as a community engagement director. Find him at www.cfausto.art or www.faustocabrera.com, or reach out at [email protected]

Ruby Djuna Haack is from Portland, Oregon and holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. She was awarded the 2023 Mississippi Review Prize for Nonfiction for her essay, “Aftermath,” for which she was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find her essay, “Ruins” in The Rumpus, or her diary project on Substack at incasegodiswatching.substack.com. In her free time, she likes to make and trade zines.