Patrycja Humienik & Austin Araujo – We Contain Landscapes and At the Park on the Edge of the Country

Name: Patrycja Humienik & Austin Araujo – We Contain Landscapes and At the Park on the Edge of the Country
Start: 2025-05-02T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-05-02T21:00:00-05:00
Location: Prairie Lights Bookstore

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Patrycja Humienik & Austin Araujo – We Contain Landscapes and At the Park on the Edge of the Country

May 2 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Join us for a double-feature reading by poets Patrycja Humienik, who will read from her new book of poems, We Contain Landscapes, and Austin Araujo, a current Iowa NWP student who will read from his new poetry collection, At the Park on the Edge of the Country.

Described as a collection “haunted by questions of desire, borders, and the illusion of national belonging” (patrycjasara.com), We Contain Landscapes is praised by poet Victoria Chang as “intensely beautiful poems that arrange perception and then rearrange it,” while Joanna Klink, author of The Nightfields, says, “Patrycja Humienik confronts the agonizing betrayals of nation-states, as well as the pressures of sexuality, the obliterating lure of the internet. She writes with a physicality that is utterly mesmerizing. Shot through with radiance and self-possession, Humienik’s poems are reminders that life at the edge of exorbitant longing can feel more free, more alive.”

Like Humienik, Austin Araujo also writes of identity in At the Park on the Edge of the Country by “map[ping] the intricacies of memory, immigration, and belonging through the experiences of one Mexican American family—his own—in the rural American South, crystallizing memory and self-knowledge as collaborative, multivocal affairs” (ohiostatepress.org). At the Park on the Edge of the Country is praised as “simply cinematic” and “an imaginative debut” by poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of the New York Times bestseller World of Wonders and the judge who selected Araujo as the winner of the 2023 Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize; Araujo’s collection is also praised by bestselling author Ross Gay, who describes At the Park on the Edge of the Country as a collection of “wrenching, complicated, grown-ass poems about fathers, and about fathers and sons” and marvels at “how patient Araujo is in those poems, how he lets them answer to music, and love.”

Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants, is a writer, editor, and teaching artist from Evanston, IL. She is an MFA candidate at UW-Madison and serves as Events Director for The Seventh Wave, where she is also an editor for TSW’s Community Anthologies project. She has developed writing + movement workshops for the Henry Art Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, Puksta Civic Engagement Foundation, in prisons, and elsewhere.

Austin Araujo is a writer from northwest Arkansas. A recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, his poems have recently appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Gulf Coast. His debut collection, At the Park on the Edge of the Country, was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the 2023 The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Prize and is published by Mad Creek Books in 2025. He currently lives in Iowa City, where he’s a current student at the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and is at work on a book about Prince.