4/05: Launch Reading for ALT-NATURE by Saretta Morgan, with Keeonna Harris, Paul Hlava Ceballos, and Yanyi

 Saretta Morgan was born in Appalachia and raised on military installations. Her recent work considers the ecologies and intimacies that form in the wake of U.S. militarization. Her first full-length book, Alt-Nature, (Coffee House Press, 2024) maps relationships between Blackness and migration in the U.S.- Mexico borderlands. She is the author of the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival and room for a counter interior. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and organizes with No More Deaths. She currently lives in Atlanta Georgia. 

 Keeonna Harris is a storyteller, organizer, and mother-of-five. She received her PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University, where her dissertation research analyzed the experiences of Black Women navigating motherhood and mass incarceration. She is an inaugural recipient of the inaugural 2018-2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. She also received the 2021 Tin House Summer Writing Residency, the 2023 Baldwin Center for the Arts Residency, a 2023 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence and the 2023 Edith Wharton Resident. Keeonna has written for Salon.com and has a chapter in the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023) and an interview in (Super)vision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (ed. Sophie Hamcher), Orbis, 2023. Her forthcoming memoir, Mainline Mama (Amistad, 2025), draws from her experiences as a Black woman, teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner while building community in the borderlands of the prison. Beyond research and writing, Keeonna emphasizes mothering in movements for justice as a tool for organizing, and as a deeply rooted connection between women, families and communities facing similar circumstances. Keeonna is committed to community and is currently working to build a support and advocacy network for mothers and children who have incarcerated partners and parents.

 Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Washington State Book Award. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has fellowships from CantoMundo, Artist Trust, and the Poets House. He has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast and Seattle’s The Stranger. He currently lives in Seattle with his family, where he practices echocardiography.

Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Most recently, he is the recipient of a 2023 Vermont Arts Council Grant and a 2022 Tanne Foundation Award. He gives creative writing advice at his newsletter, The Reading, and teaches poetry at the Warren Wilson MFA for Writers program.