Donika Kelly: The Renunciations

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The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended.

“A lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside of old mythologies and traumas in search of new stories fashioned from love and joy. . . . Like some sort of oracle, Kelly offers us the words to create our own destinies.”—Oprah.com.

Donika Kelly will be in conversation with Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden.

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf, 2021) and Bestiary (Graywolf), recipient of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  A Cave Canem fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Kelly has received a Lannan Residency Fellowship and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.

Somali-born poet and essayist Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden, a work of poetry, photos, and experimental text, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony, winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize, and the chapbook Ordinary Heaven, which appeared in the box-set Seven New Generation African Poets.

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Donika Kelly:
The Renunciations
Bestiary

Ladan Osman:
Exiles of Eden

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