Poet Saretta Morgan will read from her new book of poetry from Coffeehouse Press, Alt-Nature, and be joined in conversation by Tisa Bryant.  Alt-Nature was written between 2018 and 2023, while Saretta Morgan lived between the Sonoran and Mojave deserts doing grassroots humanitarian aid work. “Alt-Nature feels like a search party for the haunted, the story of a collective body, a nomenclature of ache for belonging. In an homage to the humanitarian aid worker and the border crosser who often does not make their intended arrival, Morgan moves the reader with her acuity for the precise image steeped in the blooming succulence and necropolitical dynamics that dictate the deserts of Central and Southern Arizona.” —Raquel Gutiérrez

Saretta Morgan was born in Appalachia and raised on military installations. She’s interested in the ecologies and intimacies that materialize in the shadows of U.S. militarization. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and organizes with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths, and with About Face: Veterans Against the War.  She is the author of Feeling Upon Arrival, and Room for a Counter Interior.  She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation.

Morgan will be joined in conversation by Tisa Bryant.  Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of the anthology War Diaries.  She is working on The Curator, a novel of Black female subjectivity and imagined cinema. Residual, a meditation on grief, longing, desire and archival research, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She teaches in the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.