More info
Here
Please join us for a reading from Erin Keane’s new memoir, Runaway, followed by a conversation with poet, Maggie Smith.
In 1970, Erin Keane’s mother ran away from home for the first time. She was thirteen years old. At fifteen, she met a man in New York City and married him. He was thirty-six. Through a deft balance of journalistic digging, cultural criticism, and poetic reimagining, Keane pieces together the true story of her mother’s teenage years, questioning almost everything she’s been told about her parents and their relationship. Along the way, she also considers how pop culture has kept similar narratives alive in her. At stake within
Runaway are some of the most profound questions we can ask ourselves: What’s true? What gets remembered? Who gets to tell the stories that make us who we are?
Erin Keane is a critic, poet, essayist, and journalist. She’s the author of three collections of poetry, and editor of
The Louisville Anthology (Belt Publishing). Her writing has appeared in many publications and anthologies, and in 2018, she co-produced and co-hosted the limited audio series
These Miracles Work: A Hold Steady Podcast. She is editor in chief at
Salon, where she has worked since 2014, and she teaches in the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
Maggie Smith is the author of several books, including
Good Bones and the national bestsellers
Goldenrod and
Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her poems and essays have appeared in the
New York Times, the
New Yorker, the
Guardian, the
Paris Review,
Tin House, the
Washington Post, and
The Best American Poetry. Her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and was called “the official poem of 2016” by PRI (Public Radio International). A freelance writer and editor, Smith is on the MFA faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and serves as an Editor at Large for the
Kenyon Review. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
