Catharina Coenen will read from her newest essay collection, Unexploded Ordance, and will be joined in conversation with Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program graduate Stephanie Krzywonos. Described as “imaginative prose that interrogates the past with a poet’s curiosity and a scientist’s pen,” Unexploded Ordnance “seeks to answer how we are shaped by the stories we inherit…After moving from Germany to the United States to work as a professor of biology, Catharina Coenen takes up residence in a second language to voice the questions she could not ask at home: what exactly did her family live through during World War II, and to what extent are they implicated? What terrors did her grandmother, mother, and aunt endure, and why are women’s wartime stories so hard to find? How much of the self is shaped by the traumas and passions that come to us through our DNA? Balancing literature with historical research, old letters with new conversations, Coenen peels back generational silences to walk alongside her grandmother as she comes of age during Hitler’s rise to power, watches her friends disappear one by one, and flees bombing raids with her tiny daughters, escaping from city to town, rented room to orphanage, parish house to hospital, trying to survive. Weaving reflections on language, biology, queerness, art, and memory, Coenen moves between the personal and the universal with stunning honesty and elegance.” (catharinacoenen.com/book) Kirkus Reviews praises Unexploded Ordance as “a memoir of unbearable honesty,” while Carmel McMahon, author of In Ordinary Time, says: “A work of tremendous emotional and intellectual heft. . . . In lucid and lyrical prose, Catharina Coenen pieces together fragments of her German family’s history through Hitler’s rise to power, WWII and its aftermath.”

Catharina Coenen came to the United States from Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to attend graduate school. She now teaches biology at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Her essays have appeared in literary magazines including The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, and Best of the Net. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Flash Nonfiction Prize awarded by The Forge, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and Residencies at Hedgebrook and at Millay Arts.

Stephanie Krzywonos is a graduate of the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and is originally from Holland, Michigan. She has worked as a ranger, a professional driver, a pseudo-social worker, a farmer, and the coordinator for Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Her first book, Ice Folks: An Antarctic Memoir, tells the story of living and working at the largest research station in Antarctica through six summers and one long polar winter and is forthcoming from Atria Books in the fall of 2026.