Reading from "Omena Bay Testament" by Gail Griffin

Gail Griffin will read from "Omena Bay Testament," her debut book of poetry and winner of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize.

Registration is not required. Seating is limited.

About the author

Gail Griffin is a Parfet Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Kalamazoo College where she taught from 1977 to 2013. She is the author of four nonfiction books, including "The Events of October: Murder-suicide on a Small Campus" (2010) and "Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces" (2020), and her first poetry chapbook, "Virginals: A Book of Elizabethan Interiors," published in 2012. 

Griffin has given workshops on memoir writing, white privilege and biographical poetry.

About the book

Gail Griffin’s “Omena Bay Testament” takes us across landscapes of winter and water through the possibility of love and the tragedy of death to a ravishing moment where there is nothing left to want. An accomplished nonfiction writer, Griffin captures the fullness and limitations of being with remarkable depth and tenacity in her debut collection of poetry and prose. "I’m cloaked in the invisibility that comes to women at a certain point," she writes, and it is from that place of being off-stage where her narratives—harrowing, nuanced, layered—brilliantly forge a path between past and present, the living and the dead. I can't think of another book that gifts its readers with such a breadth of time and experience. Sweeping and seamless, Griffin shifts between wide and exacting gazes, from poems of quiet interiority to the larger breaking world, especially with her masterful sequence in response to news excerpts. This book is a life; it is a gift of integrity and lasting art. —Jennifer K. Sweeney, from Goodreads