Jennifer Eli Bowen in conv with Inara Verzemnieks and Angela Pelster – The Book of Kin

St. Paul-based author Jennifer Eli Bowen will read from her newest book, The Book of Kin, and will be joined in conversation with Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program alum and professor Inara Verzemnieks as well as Angela Pelster. Described by publisher Milkweed as a “remarkable debut that explores the imperfect ways we care for one another, and how we seek repair when care fails,” The Book of Kin is an essay collection that explores themes of community, solitude, and love. “Drawing on her experiences as a mother, daughter, and founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, the country’s largest and most enduring prison-based literary organization, she examines the wild spectrum of shapes that care can take. She investigates the role of community across the world and in her own neighborhood, driven by a curiosity to uncover what might be gleaned from various vanishments in her own life: the shadow of her father, disappeared backyard chickens, a Moleskine notebook that passes in and out of her Little Free Library…Unflinching, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, The Book of Kin encourages us not to abandon each other, reminding us that “harm is shared, and healing is too” (milkweed.org). Bestselling author Hanif Abdurraquib praises The Book of Kin as “an expansive experience … beautiful, brave, and inventive.”

Jennifer Eli Bowen is a writer, arts instructor, and editor. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, The Arts and Letters Prize, and the Tim McGinnis Award, and her writing has appeared in The Sun magazine, The Iowa Review, Orion, and Kenyon Review. The founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, she lives in St. Paul, a block in any direction from sidewalk poetry and snow.

Inara Verzemnieks is the author of the memoir Among the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe, published by W.W. Norton. The book, which the Washington Post in a recent review called “important,” and “exquisitely written,” retraces the steps of her grandmother, a war refugee, and her great-aunt, a Siberian exile, in the wake of World War II, and recounts Verzemnieks’s own journey back to the remote Latvian village where her family broke apart. A Pushcart Prize winner and the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing, she previously worked as a newspaper journalist for thirteen years. Her essays and journalism have appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, and Creative Nonfiction. She is especially interested in stories that cannot be accessed unless the writer is on the ground, fully immersed in the lives she is trying to understand – stories that demand that we stay and inhabit a place until we move past seeing it simply as spectacle. She is a graduate of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program.

Angela Pelster’s new essay collection The Evolution of Fire: A Memoir in Essays is forthcoming with Milkweed Editions, April 2026. Her first essay collection Limber won the Great Lakes Colleges Association award and was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She’s been a McKnight fellow, a Bread Loaf Fellow and a Minnesota State Arts Board grantee. She is the founder and director of Writers Go to the Movies, and she lives and teaches in St Paul, Minnesota.